Capitalism Kritik
Negative
1NC (long)
Capitalism has reached its tipping point and now is key – the revolution is coming and
will be successful
Hunziker 2012
(Robert website that posts political articles and has been claimed to be the best political newsletter by Out of Bounds Magazine, ‘12
(CounterPunch.org Robert, 7/11, “Capitalism’s Boundless War”, http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/11/capitalisms-boundless-war/) CW
The streets
of the world’s capital cities are war zones of hopelessness, but as people gather together, this
despair transforms into a fierce determination, underlain by great expectations, like in 1848, when the
only European-wide collapse of the status quo occurred in the Revolutions of 1848 also popularly
known at the time as: The Spring of Nations. Similar to that challenge of authority over 150 years ago,
as of today, an epic battle, an undeclared war, rages around the world, erupting every week in
another capital city, challenging the legitimacy and credibility of capitalism. For example, July 9th, 2012, Qatif,
Saudi Arabia, one of the country’s largest-ever demonstrations left two dead and 12 injured when security forces confronted street protestors
after the shooting of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent anti-government activist and Shia cleric.¶ The
Revolutions of 1848
ultimately involved 50 countries throughout Europe and Latin America. At the time, there was no
coordination among dissenters, but widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership was infectious
across borders and beyond ethnic differences. Citizens of the world wanted more participation in how their lives were
determined, i.e., democracy. Tens of thousands lost their lives in a futile effort, a bloody affaire that ended as abruptly as it began, within one
year, forever memorialized by the words of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (French philosopher and economic theorist, 1809-1865), “We have been
beaten and humiliated… scattered, imprisoned, disarmed and gagged. The fate of European democracy has slipped from our hands.”¶
Dissatisfaction with political leadership (and, by inference, the capitalist state) today is more
ubiquitous than in 1848 because instantaneous communication knows no barriers. Furthermore, what
is known is this: Capitalism has failed as an economic system for society at large. By
disproportionately favoring an elite minority who have gamed their own system, thus, sealing their
own fate, capitalism has become as pejorative a term today as aristocrat was in 1848. And, because history
has demonstrated, time and again, that no socio-economic system is static, this brings to the forefront questions about the likely life cycle for
modern-day capitalism. Is it passé, an economic system that has already outlived its usefulness? And, if so, then, where are the various
impulses of dissent headed, pointed in what direction, if not capitalism? These are questions that would otherwise be deemed inappropriate, if
not for the current state of world affaires, but the answers are yet to be formulated.¶ This
grandiose worldwide dissatisfaction
with the status quo is not business as usual like a normal business cycle, which ends with renewal of
prosperity. No, by all appearances, this is a deep-seated disintegration of economic relationships,
which have existed in a delicate balance of competing interests for 200 years.¶ Every war has a
catalyst, and the capitalists themselves have brought on this one by depriving the bourgeoisie and
proletariat a fair share of the bounty on a worldwide basis in places like the United States, Indonesia,
South Korea, Chile, and throughout Europe. Now that capitalism is universal, the population of the
world sees its effects in unison rather than individually by nation-state, but the problem is not capitalism per se. The problem is
abuse of the capitalist system by capitalists. What is the evidence of this abuse?¶ The evidence is tens and hundreds of
thousands of people in the streets chanting, sloganeering, “End the Oligarchy” in NYC, “Democracy
Not Corporatization” in Paris “Fraude Pobreza” or “Fraud and Poverty” in Madrid, “Hands Off Our
Pensions” in Athens, tens of thousands demonstrating in front of Indonesia’s presidential palace in
Jakarta demanding a decent living wage, tens of thousands of students in Santiago protesting the
profiteering in the state educational system, hundreds of Malaysian lawyers staging street protests
opposed to governmental plans to ban street rallies, and uppermost in the consciousness of this
worldwide sloganeering is a profound repugnance of corporate greed, or crony capitalism, and a
deep-seated hostility towards the chicanery behind Wall Street/banking practices as well as the
‘perceived’ embezzlement of valuable nation-state resources by the wealthy elite via political
influence and subterfuge within taxation policies that favor only the rich. We know this is true
because the sloganeering and the placards held up high within the masses of tens of thousands of
people tell this story for the whole world to see.¶ The elites of capitalism have only themselves to
blame for igniting the flames of dissent, which have manifest as the result of a combination of events that have accumulated
these past years, like the “perfect storm” bringing on protests from Montreal-to-Beijing-to-Mumbai-to-Moscow-to-Paris-to-Santiagoto-NYC. The antecedents to this war are:¶ Worldwide trade agreements, like NAFTA, favoring corporate profit at the expense of labor and
environmental integrity, and this same formula is found within all worldwide trade pacts. The World Trade Organization (”WTO”), the preeminent trade organization, is accused of widening the social gap between rich and poor by promoting globalization at the expense of labor’s
rights. American workers recognize this as the outsourcing of good paying jobs from America to low wage countries with loose labor codes that
embody circa 19th century labor standards whilst operating in the 21st.¶ According to Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman in Top 10
Reasons to Shutter the WTO, Mother Jones, Nov. 1999, “Commercialism trumps human rights, democracy, the environment, and labor, while
communities and developing nations get the shaft.” They claim the WTO’s elitists’ promotions facilitate global commerce for multinational
wealthy interests at the expense of efforts to promote local economic development and policies that move communities, countries, and regions
in the direction of greater self-reliance. Thus, fragmenting and dispersing the framework of communities or countries that otherwise constitute
a source of internal development. For example, infant domestic industries in developing countries are crushed by multinationals, causing
massive social dislocation of millions of workers who have no safety net.¶ It is no secret amongst protestors of the WTO that the elites, by
undercutting labor and disregarding environmental concerns, as well as cavalierly co-opting the sanctity of local economic development, utilize
the WTO as a platform to further ‘globalization’ purely to the benefit of multinational corporate elites. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General
Electric, speaks for the multinationals when he says, “Ideally, you’d have every plant you own on a barge.” The barge could be moved to
whichever country happens to have the cheapest labor (A Dirty History of Discrimination and Ignorance, Amanda Wilson, ATLIS-Atlantic
International Studies Organization.)¶ WTO demonstrations have become such a regular feature at WTO meetings that they should be listed on
the official WTO program of events, and combined with today’s elitist’s greed, corruption, and chicanery amongst Wall Street, politicians, and
commercial bankers, the long-standing issues surrounding the WTO add fuel to the raging fires… connecting the dots of ‘informed’ dissent.¶
Connecting the dots became much easier with the Granddaddy of All Financial Ineptitude and Corruption, the biggest-ever corporate heist,
resulting in the 2007-08 worldwide financial meltdown, connecting huge dots for all to see, glaringly exposing the whole enchilada, other than
this monumental
debacle has served as the catalyst for capitalism’s boundless war. At the end of the day, this brutal
take down of the entire world economy may be the demise of capitalism because it is breaking down
the financial/economic system like never before. Otherwise, the final arbiters of financial order and stability, the world’s
Central Bankers, would not be scrambling month-after-month, injecting trillions into banking liquidity, buying sovereign
debt, propping up this monstrous on-going disaster, like the Lernaean Hydra of Greek mythology, as
soon as one head is lopped off, another two appears, as one country is poisoned by insolvency
followed by another. And, it is the average taxpayer who supports, and pays for, the errors and
malfeasance of the elite who profited so handsomely on the backs of innocent citizenry from Sydney westward to Fairbanks.¶ The
the mystery of why nobody has gone to jail (see: Coup of the Elites, CounterPunch June 26, 2012.) Arguably,
Great Heist of 2007-08 is the culmination of corporate hubris, previewed a decade earlier, when Enron, which company was a major part of
George Bush’s political career, and a company with few tangible assets, learned how to ‘cook the books’ because of political liberalization, via
contacts in the right places, allowing companies to operate in countries previously forbidden, thus, adding to the complexity of their
operations, and they used financial derivatives to manage risk but actually as an effective tool to obscure their corrupted financial results. This
is a continuing problem to this day; for example, JP Morgan Chase recently reported loses of $2 billion, but oops… no wait a minute, maybe it’s
$30 billion. Even the bankers are not sure of their true gains or losses with the complexity of modern-day financial instruments. Isn’t is obvious
that incalculable financial manias should not be part of commercial banking, the
reservoirs of public savings, but this is only
a portion of the games elites play with the public’s money. What is the hapless public to think when a former governor
and a former U.S. Senator, a figure of pubic trust, like Jon Corzine of MF Global testifies before Congress, Dec. 2011, he does not know where
the hundreds of millions of customer’s money in MF Global disappeared to… huh… he was CEO?¶ One
after another, whenever or
wherever an opening occurs to ‘game the system’ the elite have jumped at the opportunity, including
paid-for political influence to skew tax laws in favor of the rich at the expense of average taxpayers
who shoulder the burden of a national debt that is overly inflated because of fancy tax laws the allow
leading figureheads in society, like Mitt Romney, to pay a tax of only 15%, a lower rate than paid by his
garbage collector.¶ It is always the average person, the average taxpayer who shoulders the burden
whenever corporate malfeasance surfaces to trash national economies, as in Europe today where public employee
and general worker benefits have been crucified by austerity measures (dictated by the IMF, World Bank, and EU) to heal battered
national treasuries as if an epidemic of old, like the Black Death, swept across the countryside,
ravaging lives. It is no wonder people of all stripes, like doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, and teachers
take to the streets. They are being sacrificed on an altar of corporate malfeasance and corruption
whilst accumulation of wealth is seen as an exclusive club reserved for only those who are already
rich, similar to Louis XVI’s reign in 18th century France.¶ The world is getting a taste of history, of what it was like in
the late 18th century, a few years before the French Revolution burst lose on the scene, beheading
one aristocrat after another, as quickly as they could gather them up, simply because they were rich,
but there were obviously deeper meanings behind this slaughter. For example, France’s national
treasury was empty as a result of empire building and foreign wars, and this was aggravated by nasty
disagreement over reform of the taxation system, which was grossly inequitable, leading to paralysis,
and an agrarian crisis with food shortages, an ambitious bourgeoisie allied with aggrieved peasants
and wage-earners influenced by enlightenment ideals, and years of pent-up resentment of a dying
seigniorial system.¶ In the end, it was the people in the streets of Paris that served as the spark that
led to outright rebellion and death at the hand of dreadful black-hooded executioners in the public
square, the Place de la Révolution. The guillotine was most active during the “Reign of Terror“, in the summer of 1794, when, in a single
month, more than 1,300 people (over 40 daily) were executed.¶ The lesson of history, which bewilderingly continues to
repeat itself, is: The people in the streets ultimately determine the fate of incorrigible governments
that are embedded with unscrupulous sources of financial power. These scenarios never end on a
sanguine note but often times end in a sanguinary manner.
Investing in transportation infrastructure enables the recovery and flow of capital –
our task is to destroy these avenues, not repair them.
Bryant ’11 (Levi, Philosophy Professor at Collins University, December 1st, 2011, “Onticology and
Politics”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/onticology-and-politics/)
So if I consider myself a Marxist materialist then why am I embracing realism? Part of the reasons arise
from the very sort of critical historical meditation you bring up in your remarks. In my view, the move
beyond Fordist modes of production consisted in a shift to media/knowledge/information production
roughly at the behest of biopower. Nonetheless, this form of production– while itself tarrying with the
incorporeal –is grounded in a physical infrastructure. Flows of capital and the ability of capital to
exercise its power literally needs highways, satellites, trains, farms, land, fiber optic cables, ocean
going ships, and so on. Without these channels of transportation and information transfer, coupled
with sources of calories and energy to run these engines, capital is unable to continue itself for, as
Harvey points out, capital only exists in the motion of capital. For me this Marxist thesis about motion
and being is true of all objects. Consequently, if you wish to smash an object you have to find a way to
halt its internal motion or the process by which it sustains, continues, and propagates itself. To get a
sense of what I’m talking about, take the example of OWS. I am absolutely on the side of the OWSers,
but I also find myself frustrated as it seems to me that much of it is unfolding at the level of an ideology
critique (cultural Marxism) and a desire to persuade these governmental and corporate forces that is
doomed to fall on deaf ears. Occupations are taking place everywhere except, I think, in the places
where they would have a chance to make a real difference and produce real results.
Left unchecked, capitalism makes extinction inevitable
Meszaros 2000 (Istvan, Prof. of Philosophy @ Univ. of Sussex. Monthly Review. January, LN)
Given the way in which the ongoing tends of global development assert themselves, in a clearly
identifiable way, we may have perhaps a few decades to bring to a halt their destuctiveness, but
certainly not centuries. The great liberal economist, Schumpeter, used to characterize—and idalize—
capitalissm as a system of “productive destruction.” This was, on the whole, true of capital’s
ascending phase of development. Today, by contrast, we have reached a stage when, instead of
“productive destruction,” we are even increasingly confronted by capital’s destructive production,
proceeding on a frightening scale. You ask: “do you think that great mass movements have a chance to
blossom again” in the age of globalization and under the “third way” of European social democracy? For
me the “third way” is nothing more than a wishful fantasy, in defense of the established, untenable,
order. Sociologists like Max Scheler have been predicting for almost a century the merging of the
classes into a happy “middle-class”—one could only wonder: the middle of what? In reality, social
polarization in our time is greater than ever before, making a mockery of the old social democratic
expectations of eliminating—or at least greatly reducing—inequality through “progressive taxation.”
As things turned out, we saw the diametrical opposite. To give you just two, very recent, examples: 1.)
according to the Budget Office of the U.S. Congress (no “left-wing exaggerator,” for sure), the income of
the top 1 percent is equivalent to that of the bottom one hundred million people, i.e. nearly 40
percent of the population. Twenty years ago it was “only” 1 percent against forty-nine million, i.e., less
than twenty percent of the U.S. population. Some “equalization” and “merging of the classes into one
another!” 2.) In England child poverty trebled in the last twenty years, and continued to be aggravated
under the “New Labour” government in the last two and a half years. The “new labour” government
preaches the vacuous “third way” sermon, and practices with ever greater severity the politics of
antilabor measures, imposing even such policies which Mrs. Thatcher did not dare to introduce, cutting
the Welfare State in every possible way, including even the precarious livelihood of the handicapped.
Only a fool can assume that this can go on forever. So, in answer to your question, I am firmly
convinced that there is a future for a radical mass movement, not only in England but also in the rest
of the world. Or, to put it another way, if there is no future for such a movement, there can be no
future for humanity itself. If I had to modify Rosa Luxemburg’s dictum, in relation to the dangers we
face, I would add to “socialism or barbarism:” “barbarism if we are lucky”—in the sense that
extermination of humankind is the ultimate concomitant of capital’s destructive course of
development. And the world of that third possibility, beyond the alternatives of “socialism or
barbarism,” would be fit only for cockroaches, which are said to be able to endure lethally high levels
of nuclear radiation. This is the only rational meaning of capital’s third way.
The alternative is to Occupy [Insert Affirmative Infrastructure].
Rather than repair the circulatory system, we must block the arteries and force a heart
attack on the system. This necessitates a rejection of the 1AC
Bryant ’11 (Levi Bryant, December 1st, 2011, Philosophy Professor at Collins University, Onticology and
Politics, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/onticology-and-politics/)
To get a sense of what I’m talking about, take the example of OWS. I am absolutely on the side of the
OWSers, but I also find myself frustrated as it seems to me that much of it is unfolding at the level of an
ideology critique (cultural Marxism) and a desire to persuade these governmental and corporate
forces that is doomed to fall on deaf ears. Occupations are taking place everywhere except, I think, in
the places where they would have a chance to make a real difference and produce real results. If we
think of capitalist social systems as being akin to an organic body, then these social systems will have
a circulatory system and a nervous system. The nervous system of a capitalist social system would be
the various mediums through which information is transmitted (internet, phones, television,
newspapers, etc) as well that the events that take place in those systems (images, songs, reports,
narratives, articles, etc), while the circulatory system would be the various paths of distribution and
production the system requires to produce this sort of social structure such as highways, trains,
airports, portions of the internet used for monetary exchange, farms, shipping lanes, etc. The political
goal of the critic of capitalism requires causing capitalism to have a stroke or a heart attack
(continuing with the metaphor of circulatory systems). But if that’s to be done, it’s necessary to occupy
not a park in front of Wall Street or a governors office, but rather the arteries capitalism needs to
survive. Why not occupy the highways? Why not occupy the ports (Oakland was a good move)? Why
not occupy the internets, finding ways to block commerce traffic? My view is that if all focus is on the
nervous system, these infrastructural dimensions are entirely missed and we end up with a form of
political engagement that is merely one more form of information production leaving the basic
structure of the system intact. This is why I’m an object-oriented ontologist
1NC (Short)
Investing in transportation infrastructure enables the recovery and flow of capital –
our task is to destroy these avenues, not repair them.
Bryant ’11 (Levi, Philosophy Professor at Collins University, December 1st, 2011, “Onticology and
Politics”, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/onticology-and-politics/)
So if I consider myself a Marxist materialist then why am I embracing realism? Part of the reasons arise
from the very sort of critical historical meditation you bring up in your remarks. In my view, the move
beyond Fordist modes of production consisted in a shift to media/knowledge/information production
roughly at the behest of biopower. Nonetheless, this form of production– while itself tarrying with the
incorporeal –is grounded in a physical infrastructure. Flows of capital and the ability of capital to
exercise its power literally needs highways, satellites, trains, farms, land, fiber optic cables, ocean
going ships, and so on. Without these channels of transportation and information transfer, coupled
with sources of calories and energy to run these engines, capital is unable to continue itself for, as
Harvey points out, capital only exists in the motion of capital. For me this Marxist thesis about motion
and being is true of all objects. Consequently, if you wish to smash an object you have to find a way to
halt its internal motion or the process by which it sustains, continues, and propagates itself. To get a
sense of what I’m talking about, take the example of OWS. I am absolutely on the side of the OWSers,
but I also find myself frustrated as it seems to me that much of it is unfolding at the level of an ideology
critique (cultural Marxism) and a desire to persuade these governmental and corporate forces that is
doomed to fall on deaf ears. Occupations are taking place everywhere except, I think, in the places
where they would have a chance to make a real difference and produce real results.
Left unchecked, capitalism makes extinction inevitable
Meszaros 2000 (Istvan, Prof. of Philosophy @ Univ. of Sussex. Monthly Review. January, LN)
Given the way in which the ongoing tends of global development assert themselves, in a clearly
identifiable way, we may have perhaps a few decades to bring to a halt their destuctiveness, but
certainly not centuries. The great liberal economist, Schumpeter, used to characterize—and idalize—
capitalissm as a system of “productive destruction.” This was, on the whole, true of capital’s
ascending phase of development. Today, by contrast, we have reached a stage when, instead of
“productive destruction,” we are even increasingly confronted by capital’s destructive production,
proceeding on a frightening scale. You ask: “do you think that great mass movements have a chance to
blossom again” in the age of globalization and under the “third way” of European social democracy? For
me the “third way” is nothing more than a wishful fantasy, in defense of the established, untenable,
order. Sociologists like Max Scheler have been predicting for almost a century the merging of the
classes into a happy “middle-class”—one could only wonder: the middle of what? In reality, social
polarization in our time is greater than ever before, making a mockery of the old social democratic
expectations of eliminating—or at least greatly reducing—inequality through “progressive taxation.”
As things turned out, we saw the diametrical opposite. To give you just two, very recent, examples: 1.)
according to the Budget Office of the U.S. Congress (no “left-wing exaggerator,” for sure), the income of
the top 1 percent is equivalent to that of the bottom one hundred million people, i.e. nearly 40
percent of the population. Twenty years ago it was “only” 1 percent against forty-nine million, i.e., less
than twenty percent of the U.S. population. Some “equalization” and “merging of the classes into one
another!” 2.) In England child poverty trebled in the last twenty years, and continued to be aggravated
under the “New Labour” government in the last two and a half years. The “new labour” government
preaches the vacuous “third way” sermon, and practices with ever greater severity the politics of
antilabor measures, imposing even such policies which Mrs. Thatcher did not dare to introduce, cutting
the Welfare State in every possible way, including even the precarious livelihood of the handicapped.
Only a fool can assume that this can go on forever. So, in answer to your question, I am firmly
convinced that there is a future for a radical mass movement, not only in England but also in the rest
of the world. Or, to put it another way, if there is no future for such a movement, there can be no
future for humanity itself. If I had to modify Rosa Luxemburg’s dictum, in relation to the dangers we
face, I would add to “socialism or barbarism:” “barbarism if we are lucky”—in the sense that
extermination of humankind is the ultimate concomitant of capital’s destructive course of
development. And the world of that third possibility, beyond the alternatives of “socialism or
barbarism,” would be fit only for cockroaches, which are said to be able to endure lethally high levels
of nuclear radiation. This is the only rational meaning of capital’s third way.
The alternative is to Occupy [Insert Affirmative Infrastructure].
Rather than repair the circulatory system, we must block the arteries and force a heart
attack on the system. This necessitates a rejection of the 1AC
Bryant ’11 (Levi Bryant, December 1st, 2011, Philosophy Professor at Collins University, Onticology and
Politics, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/onticology-and-politics/)
To get a sense of what I’m talking about, take the example of OWS. I am absolutely on the side of the
OWSers, but I also find myself frustrated as it seems to me that much of it is unfolding at the level of an
ideology critique (cultural Marxism) and a desire to persuade these governmental and corporate
forces that is doomed to fall on deaf ears. Occupations are taking place everywhere except, I think, in
the places where they would have a chance to make a real difference and produce real results. If we
think of capitalist social systems as being akin to an organic body, then these social systems will have
a circulatory system and a nervous system. The nervous system of a capitalist social system would be
the various mediums through which information is transmitted (internet, phones, television,
newspapers, etc) as well that the events that take place in those systems (images, songs, reports,
narratives, articles, etc), while the circulatory system would be the various paths of distribution and
production the system requires to produce this sort of social structure such as highways, trains,
airports, portions of the internet used for monetary exchange, farms, shipping lanes, etc. The political
goal of the critic of capitalism requires causing capitalism to have a stroke or a heart attack
(continuing with the metaphor of circulatory systems). But if that’s to be done, it’s necessary to occupy
not a park in front of Wall Street or a governors office, but rather the arteries capitalism needs to
survive. Why not occupy the highways? Why not occupy the ports (Oakland was a good move)? Why
not occupy the internets, finding ways to block commerce traffic? My view is that if all focus is on the
nervous system, these infrastructural dimensions are entirely missed and we end up with a form of
political engagement that is merely one more form of information production leaving the basic
structure of the system intact. This is why I’m an object-oriented ontologist
Link – Generic
Neither the discourse nor the action of the plan can be separated from capitalism.
Belding ’11 (Michael Belding, Journalist of Transportation, December 7th, 2011, Rail, Road
Infrastructure is part of Orthodox Capitalism,
http://www.iowastatedaily.com/opinion/article_24724abe-1a13-11e1-b3e3-001cc4c03286.html)
California's recent decision to continue with its plans to build a high-speed rail system, despite criticism
from Republicans, highlights the importance of investment in infrastructure. The project carries a high
cost, $98 billion, and will not be finished until 2033. However, transportation infrastructure and
accommodation facilitates the economic growth we need. Building roads and railways, however,
provides a space in which people can move and trade. In ancient times, this investment in creating a
place for business consisted of building a new forum. Now, we build roads. It's not a matter of being
Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal. Investment in infrastructure goes across party lines.
Historically speaking, there have been many reasons for building such projects as the Interstate Highway
System. Chances are good that you use it every break to get home. I use it every day to drive down here
from my home. Ideologically, government support of public works — roads, canals and the like — is
not a new idea. Adam Smith advocated government support of infrastructure (as well as the judicial
branch, a standing army and public education for the poor) when he laid the groundwork for the
capitalism that so defines our way of life. Funding infrastructure is, in classical conservative thought,
orthodox.
Transportation infrastructure is a capitalist tool that is necessary to complete the
integration of the populace into the globalized system and inevitably serve as the
foundation for expansion, guaranteeing imperialism and unchecked violence.
Smith 2008
(Jason, assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico, "The New Deal Order," Enterprise and Society Vol. 9 Num
3 2008, Muse MattG)
By using the lens of political economy to focus on the New Deal's public works spending, we can begin
to see the outlines of a different interpretation. The huge amount of funds devoted to public construction, the far-reaching federal efforts
invested in directing this money, and the long-run impact of the infrastructure itself form the components of the story of a public
works revolution.9 This revolution helped justify the new role of the federal government in American life,
legitimizing—intellectually and physically—what has come to be known as Keynesian management of the economy. By
sponsoring this infrastructure, New Dealers remade the built environment that managed the movement
of people, goods, electricity, water, and [End Page 524] waste. Among the New Deal's projects were some of the largest and
most significant structures ever built in human history.10 These programs not only anticipated the national highways and
the military-industrial complex; in the postwar period government-sponsored economic development also looked
abroad. For example, Harry Truman's Point IV program was conceived of as an international PWA, building roads and
airports in countries like Afghanistan and Vietnam. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson's vision of exporting
Keynesian style economic development to Southeast Asia by replicating the Tennessee Valley Authority on the Mekong
Delta reflected the powerful example set by the New Deal. After World War II, construction firms like Bechtel and Brown & Root (today a
subsidiary of Halliburton) took their expertise overseas as well. The
New Deal's public works programs employed millions of
unemployed workers, both urban and rural, while building the infrastructure that helped integrate the disparate
regions of the country into a national market. From the beginning, then, New Dealers built a state that was both far more
powerful and substantially less liberal than historians have realized: more powerful, in the scale and scope of the federal government's
commitment to economic development, and less liberal, in the sense that the New Deal state was focused on state-sponsored economic
development, and not, in contrast, centrally occupied with tasks like implementing its social security program (which began making payments
only in 1942), or with more radical goals, such as the direct redistribution of wealth through tax policy. By reinterpreting the New Deal in this
way through a political economic lens, we gain a new history of just how the New Deal's public works programs contributed to American
economic development. Public works also had important ramifications for state building and political party building at the federal, state, and
local levels. Harry Hopkins, the head of the WPA, once claimed that the New Deal was a political project that could "tax and tax, spend and
spend, and elect and elect." We now know this phrase's descendant, the derisive expression "tax and spend liberalism," but at the time Hopkins
made his statement it was pure genius—he succinctly identified the qualities that made New Deal liberalism so powerful and controversial: The
taxing and spending functions of government could—and [End Page 525] did—remake the physical landscape of the nation. Even more striking,
though, was that through using the taxing and spending powers of the state, New Dealers were able to remake a society's politics.11 These
accomplishments raise a central question: how do we evaluate New Deal liberalism when we attend to its political economy and place its public
works programs at its core? The New Deal's public works programs reflect a number of achievements and shortcomings. These programs
built the infrastructure that made a national market more efficient, spurred dramatic advances in
economic productivity, created a network of roads and airports, planned for national highways,
improved military bases, foreshadowed the rise of the Sunbelt, and gave the New Dealers a policy tool that could be
used to shape overseas development, from the ColdWar through the Vietnam War. Faced with the Great Depression, the
New Deal and its public works projects helped save capitalism, an achievement subsequently consolidated by
enormous public spending during World War II and the ensuing postwar economic boom.12 Bound up with these triumphs, however,
were many limitations. Most notable, of course, was the failure of the public works programs to bring an end
to mass unemployment during the Great Depression. Those that the New Deal did manage to employ were white men, for
the most part. This was hardly surprising, given their disproportionate presence in the building trades and construction industry, generally.
Surely, the New Deal had a remarkable chance to address the crisis of unemployment among African-Americans and women. Yet, in basing so
much of their public policy on the building of public works projects, New Dealers largely reinforced the gender and racial boundaries already
evident in the labor market, bypassing the maternalist legacies of Progressive Era social policy.13 When we turn to the environment, the New
Deal's shortcomings are likewise apparent. While architectural historians have generally [End Page 526] praised the New Deal for creating a
more democratic landscape, environmental historians have strongly disagreed. From their perspective, the New Deal spent far too much
money on roads and not enough on developing alternative mass transportation technologies. They charge that the
New Deal's large
promoted an imperialist view of resources, leaving nature to be exploited by a
coercive, undemocratic power elite composed of technically minded engineers and narrow-minded
bureaucrats. Developments such as the TVA displaced thousands of people, while the affordable electrical power generated by dams led
hydroelectric projects
only to increased pollution. The main achievement of the New Deal, in this view, is its role in creating an "asphalt nation." To be sure, the
environmental damage caused by the New Deal's public works projects was real, if difficult to measure. But to blame New Dealers such as Harry
Hopkins for not being mindful of the environment is to fail to recognize the historical impact of the New Deal's public works projects.14
Link – China
The China threat is a manifestation of a structural issue with capital – the fear that
non-traditional capitalism will surpass traditional western market systems produces a
violent backlash
Zizek 1999
Slavoj Zizek, researcher in sociology at the university of Ljubljana, The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of political ontology,
1999, pg. 359
After the demise of Socialism, the ultimate fear of Western capitalism is that another nation or ethnic group will beat the West on its own
capitalist terms, combining the productivity of capitalism with a form of social mores foreign to us in the West: in the l970s, the object of fear
and fascination was Japan; while now, after a short interlude of fascination with SouthEast Asia, attention is focusing
more and
more on China as the next superpower, combining capitalism with the Communist political structure.
Such fears ultimately give rise to purely phantasmic formations, like the image of China surpassing the
West in productivity while retaining its authoritarian sociopolitical structure — one is tempted to
designate this phantasmic combination the ‘Asiatic mode of capitalist production’. Against these
fears, one should emphasize that China will, sooner or later, pay the price for the unbridled development
of capitalism in new forms of social unrest and instability: the ‘winning formula’ of combining
capitalism with the Asiatic ‘closed’ ethical community life-world is doomed to explode. Now, more than
ever, one should reassert Marx’s old formula that the limit of capitalism is Capital itself: the danger to Western capitalism
comes not from outside, from the Chinese or some other monster beating us at our own game while
depriving us of Western liberal individualism, but from the inherent limit of its own process of
colonizing ever new (not only geographic but also cultural, psychic, etc.) domains, of eroding the last resistant
spheres of non-reflected substantial being, which has to end in some kind of implosion, when Capital
will no longer have any substantial content outside itself to feed on.39 One should take Marx’s
metaphor of Capital as a vampire-like entity literally: it needs some kind of pre-reflexive ‘natural
productivity’ (talents in different domains of art, inventors in science, etc.) in order to feed on its own blood, and thus to
reproduce itself — when the circle closes itself, when reflexivity becomes thoroughly universal, the whole system is threatened. Another
sign which points in this direction is how, in the sphere of what Adorno and Horkheimer called Kulturindustrie, the desubstantialization and/or
reflexivity of the production process has reached a level that threatens the whole system with global implosion. Even in high art, the recent
fashion for exhibitions in which ‘everything is permitted’ and can pass as an art object, up to mutilated animal bodies, betrays this desperate
need of cultural Capital to colonize and include in its circuit even the most extreme and pathological strata of human subjectivity. Paradoxically
— and not without irony — the first musical trend which was in a way ‘fabricated’, exploited for a short time and very soon forgotten, since it
lacked the musical substance to survive and attain the status of ‘classics’ like the early rock of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, was none other
than punk, which simultaneously marked the strongest intrusion of violent working-class protest into mainstream pop culture — in a kind of
mocking version of the Hegelian infinite judgement, in which opposites directly coincide, the raw energy of social protest coincided with the
new level of commercial prefabrication which, as it were, creates the object it sells out of itself, with no need for some ‘natural talent’ to
emerge and be subsequently exploited, like Baron Munchhausen saving himself from the swamp by pulling himself up by his own hairs. Do we
not encounter the same logic in politics, where the point is less and less to follow a coherent global programme but, rather, to try to guess, by
means of opinion polls, ‘what the people want’, and offer them that? Even in theory, doesn’t the same hold for cultural studies in the AngloSaxon domain, or for the very theory of the risk society?40 Theorists are less and less involved in substantial theoretical work, restraining
themselves to writing short ‘interventions’ which mostly display their anxiety to follow the latest theoretical trends (in feminism, for example,
perspicacious theorists soon realized that radical social constructionism —gender as pefformatively enacted, and so on — is out; that people
are getting tired of it; so they start to rediscover psychoanalysis, the Unconscious; in postcolonial studies, the latest trend is to oppose
multiculturalism as a false solution .. .). The point is thus not simply that cultural studies or risk society theory is insufficient on account of its
content: an
inherent commodification is discernible in the very form of the social mode of functioning of
what are supposed to be the latest forms of the American or European academic Left. This reflexivity, which is
also a crucial part of the ‘second modernity,’ is what the theorists of the reflexive risk society tend to leave out of
consideration.41
Link – Competitiveness
Structures based on competitiveness carries the rhetorical force of productivity and
capitalism – the endless drive for expansion makes warfare and environmental
collapse inevitable
Bristow 2009
(Gillian, School of City & Regional Planning, Cardiff University, "Resilient regions: re-‘place’ing regional competitiveness,"
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2010, 3, 153–167) MattG
In recent years, regional development
strategies have been subjugated to the hegemonic discourse of
competitiveness, such that the ultimate objective for all regional development policy-makers and
practitioners has become the creation of economic advantage through superior productivity
performance, or the attraction of new firms and labour (Bristow, 2005). A major consequence is the developing ‘ubiquitification’ of
regional development strategies (Bristow, 2005; Maskell and Malmberg, 1999). This reflects the status of competitiveness as
a key discursive construct (Jessop, 2008) that has acquired hugely significant rhetorical power for certain
interests intent on reinforcing capitalist relations (Bristow, 2005; Fougner, 2006). Indeed, the competitiveness
hegemony is such that many policies previously considered only indirectly relevant to unfettered economic growth tend to
be hijacked in support of competitiveness agendas (for example Raco, 2008; also Dannestam, 2008). This paper will
argue, however, that a particularly narrow discourse of ‘competitiveness’ has been constructed that has a number of
negative connotations for the ‘resilience’ of regions. Resilience is defined as the region’s ability to
experience positive economic success that is socially inclusive, works within environmental limits and
which can ride global economic punches (Ashby et al., 2009). As such, resilience clearly resonates with literatures on
sustainability, localisation and diversification, and the developing understanding of regions as intrinsically diverse entities with evolutionary and
context-specific development trajectories (Hayter, 2004). In contrast, the dominant discourse of competitiveness is ‘placeless’ and increasingly
associated with globalised, growth-first and environmentally malign agendas (Hudson, 2005). However, this paper will argue that the
relationships between competitiveness and resilience are more complex than might at first appear. Using insights from the Cultural Political
Economy (CPE) approach, which focuses on understanding the construction, development and spread of hegemonic policy discourses, the
paper will argue that the dominant discourse of competitiveness used in regional development policy is narrowly constructed and is thus
insensitive to contingencies of place and the more nuanced role of competition within economies. This leads to problems of resilience that can
be partly overcome with the development of a more contextualised approach to competitiveness. The paper is now structured as follows. It
begins by examining the developing understanding of resilience in the theorising and policy discourse around regional development. It then
describes the CPE approach and utilises its framework to explain both how a narrow conception of competitiveness has come to dominate
regional development policy and how resilience inter-plays in subtle and complex ways with competitiveness and its emerging critique. The
paper then proceeds to illustrate what resilience means for regional development firstly, with reference to the Transition Towns concept, and
then by developing a typology of regional strategies to show the different characteristics of policy approaches based on competitiveness and
resilience. Regional resilience Resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea whose time has come in policy discourses around localities and regions,
where it is developing widespread appeal owing to the peculiarly powerful combination of transformative pressures from below, and various
catalytic, crisis-induced imperatives for change from above. It features strongly in policy discourses around environmental management and
sustainable development (see Hudson, 2008a), but has also more recently emerged in relation to emergency and disaster planning with, for
example ‘Regional Resilience Teams’ established in the English regions to support and co-ordinate civil protection activities around various
emergency situations such as the threat of a swine flu pandemic. The discourse of resilience is also taking hold in discussions around desirable
local and regional development activities and strategies. The
recent global ‘credit crunch’ and the accompanying
increase in livelihood insecurity has highlighted the advantages of those local and regional economies
that have greater ‘resilience’ by virtue of being less dependent upon globally footloose activities,
having greater economic diversity, and/or having a determination to prioritise and effect more
significant structural change (Ashby et al, 2009; Larkin and Cooper, 2009). Indeed, resilience features particular strongly in the ‘grey’
literature spawned by thinktanks, consultancies and environmental interest groups around the consequences of the global recession,
catastrophic climate change and the arrival of the era of peak oil for localities and regions with all its implications for the longevity of carbonfuelled economies, cheap, long-distance transport and global trade. This popularly
labelled ‘triple crunch’ (New Economics
Foundation, 2008) has powerfully illuminated the potentially disastrous material consequences of the
voracious growth imperative at the heart of neoliberalism and competitiveness, both in the form of
resource constraints (especially food security) and in the inability of the current system to manage global
financial and ecological sustainability. In so doing, it appears to be galvinising previously disparate, fractured debates about the
merits of the current system, and challenging public and political opinion to develop a new, global concern with frugality, egalitarianism and
localism (see, for example Jackson, 2009; New Economics Foundation, 2008).
Link – Hegemony
US hegemony is sustained by imperial domination of the globe – this situates the US
as the global economic superpower – the impact is nuclear omnicide and ecological
collapse
Foster 2005
(John, Professor of Sociology, University of Oregon; Editor, Monthly Review, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0905jbf.htm)
The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms to which the world is heading at present:
nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the outbreak of nuclear war, and planetary ecological destruction.
These are symbolized by the Bush administration’s refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons development
and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a first step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy
and Johnson administrations) Robert McNamara stated in an article entitled “Apocalypse Soon” in the May–June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy:
“The United States has never endorsed the policy of ‘no first use,’ not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain
prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one person, the president—against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy
whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so.” The
nation with the greatest conventional military force and the
willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the greatest nuclear
force and the readiness to use it whenever it sees fit—setting the whole world on edge. The nation that
contributes more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming than any other (representing
approximately a quarter of the world’s total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing global warming and
the world’s growing environmental problems—raising the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if present trends
continue. The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority over the planet during a time of
widening global crisis: economic stagnation, increasing polarization between the global rich and the
global poor, weakening U.S. economic hegemony, growing nuclear threats, and deepening ecological
decline. The result is a heightening of international instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the world, such as the European
Community and China, that could eventually challenge U.S. power, regionally and even globally. Third world revolutions, far from ceasing, are
beginning to gain momentum again, symbolized by Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial
grip on the Middle East and its oil have had to cope with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating conditions of imperial
overstretch. With the United States brandishing its nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on the control of such
weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are entering or can be expected soon to enter the “nuclear
club.” Terrorist
blowback from imperialist wars in the third world is now a well-recognized reality, generating rising
fear of further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and elsewhere. Such vast and overlapping historical
contradictions, rooted in the combined and uneven development of the global capitalist economy
along with the U.S. drive for planetary domination, foreshadow what is potentially the most
dangerous period in the history of imperialism. The course on which U.S and world capitalism is now headed points to global
barbarism—or worse. Yet it is important to remember that nothing in the development of human history is inevitable. There still remains an
alternative path—the global struggle for a humane, egalitarian, democratic, and sustainable society.
Link – Highways
Highway infrastructure enables the economic integration of all aspects of the US – this
ensured the atrophy of rural societies and shaped the economic ideologies of
American capitalism
Hamilton 6 (Shane, assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia, "Trucking Country: Food
Politics and the Transformation of Rural Life in Postwar America," Trucking Country: Food Politics and
the Transformation of Rural Life in Postwar America, Muse)
By showing how trucking reconfigured the technological, political, and cultural relationships between
rural producers and urban consumers from the 1930s to the 1970s, my dissertation reveals the rural roots of a
radical transformation of American capitalism in the midtwentieth century. Highway transportation provided
the infrastructure for a transition from the New Deal–era political economy—based on centralized
political authority, a highly regulated economy, and collective social values—to a post–New Deal
capitalist culture marked by widespread antistatism, minimal market regulation, and fierce
individualism. From the 1930s to the late 1970s, consumer demand for low-priced food, coupled with farmers' demands for high
commodity prices, prompted the federal government to encourage agribusinesses to use long-haul trucks, piloted by fiercely independent
"truck drivin' men," to privatize the politics of food. Western
meatpackers and other agribusinesses were determined
to shred government regulations and labor unions in the name of "free enterprise," low wages, and
irresistibly low consumer prices for goods such as well-marbled steaks, jugs of milk, and frozen orange juice. The post–World
War II highway-based food economy began unraveling the social fabric of rural America for the sake
of lowconsumer prices—long before Wal-Mart became infamous for said strategy.1 Trucks, I contend, were political
technologies, used to define the contours of public policy regarding foods and farmers ; at the same time,
trucks as technologies shaped the economic and social structures underlying those political debates. In doing
so, long-haul trucking in the rural countryside set the pace for the low-price, low-wage, "free-market" economic
ideologies of late twentieth-century American capitalism.
Link – Railroads
Railroad infrastructure hollows out the national economy for the domestic work force
– this sets into motion a cannibalism of labor that turns case
Fraser 12 (Steve,writer and historian @ Columbia "More than Greed," Dissent Vol 59 Num 1 2012,
Muse,
Why? Maybe that decision stems from Madrick’s aversion
to thinking of the crisis as systemic and to a related faith in
the Democratic Party as the repository of the New Deal version of capitalism, a version many progressives would like to restore.
But the New Deal not only civilized a broken-down economic system, it also sought successfully to extend the reach of
the capitalist marketplace and credit networks not abolish them. It created the political and institutional
foundations of mass consumption capitalism. Those foundations eventually crumbled as domestic opportunities for
profitable enough capital accumulation grew scarce, a process that in turn exerted a relentless downward pressure on labor costs and the social
wage. That is to say, in an increasingly fierce struggle
to compete with lower cost foreign producers, American business
began to undermine the foundations of “effective demand” among ordinary working people that had kept
the system upright for so long. It set in motion a perverse dynamic of disaccumulation or what might be called the
auto-cannibalism of an economy eating itself alive. The most developed economy in the world began a
process of underdevelopment. Its infrastructure—road, bridges, tunnels, railroads, waterworks, dams, airports, electrical
grids—were allowed to decay. The industrial core of the economy was hollowed out by precisely those “financial
engineers” Madrick writes [End Page 103] about. Deindustrialization signaled that the old system had broken down. This became a long,
secular crisis. Gradually and then at an accelerated rate, it elicited one overriding response; namely, to leverage everything in sight. Everything
in this case included capital assets that
produced debt-based asset bubbles in stocks or housing or other
securities and commodities that provided a kind of “privatized Keynesian” stimulus package for elite financial institutions. Meanwhile,
below, a working population found itself drowning in a sea of usurious credit.
Impact – Commodification
Capitalism commodifies all values and integrates them into economic society, it takes
away sentimental value to life and replaces it with monetary gain
Offe and Ronge, 1975, New German Critique (Claus, Volker,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/487658, A.N.)
4. The key problem, however, lies in the fact that the dynamics of capitalist¶ development seem to
exhibit a constant tendency to paralyze the commodity¶ form of value. Values cease to exist in the
commodity form as soon as they¶ cease seeking exchange for money or other values. To be sure, in an
economic¶ world consisting of commodities one can never be certain that one particular¶ item
offered on the market for sale will actually find a buyer. But in this¶ simple case the failure of a value
offered for exchange is supposed to be¶ self-corrective: the owner of the exchange-seeking value will
either be forced¶ to lower the price or to offer an alternative good the use value of which does¶ have
higher chances of being bought. At least in the world of Jean Baptiste¶ Say, an economy consisting of
commodities is self-perpetuating: the failure of¶ a good as a commodity leads to other goods less
likely to fail. Similarly, parts¶ of labor and parts of capital which are, as it were, temporarily thrown
out of¶ the commodity form in the course of an economic depression, create, through¶ the very fact
of their idleness, the preconditions for a new boom (at least if¶ there is downward flexibility of prices).
The functioning of this "healthy"¶ self-corrective mechanism, however, does not seem to be the
regular case,¶ particularly in advanced capitalist societies. Marxist economic theory has¶ developed
various, though controversial, theorems which could explain such¶ failure of self-corrective
mechanisms. For example, it is assumed that¶ monopolization of the economy leads to downward
inflexibility of prices on¶ the one side, and, to a constant flow of what Baran and Sweezy have called¶
"surplus profit" on the other, i.e., monopolistic profits unsuccessfully in search¶ of investment outlets.
Another explanation is based on the increasingly social¶ character of production in capitalism. This
means increasing division of labor¶ within and among capitalist enterprises, hence increased
specialization of¶ every single unit of capital and labor, and hence diminished flexibility and¶ adaptivity to
alternative uses. Thirdly it has been argued that the periodic¶ destruction of large parts of value
through unfettered economic crises is by¶ itself a healthy economic mechanism which will improve
chances for the¶ remaining values to "perform" as commodities, but that the conflict¶ associated
with such "cleansing off" of superfluous values tend to become¶ explosive to the extent that they
have to be prevented by state intervention¶ and Keynesian policies.¶ Whatever may be the correct and
complete explanation, there is plenty of¶ 142 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE¶ everyday evidence to the effect
that both labor and capital are thrown out of¶ the commodity form, and that there is little basis for
any confidence that they¶ will be reintegrated into exchange relationships automatically
Impact – Dehumanization
Capitalism results in the dissolution of mankind and strips us of our morals – the result is
dehumanization
Horsley 10 (May 2006. Mark Horsley: Degree in Criminology from Northumbria University. Internet Journal of Criminology. “Capitalism
and Crime: The Criminogenic Potential of the Free Market.” http://www.internetjournalofcriminology.com/Hors
ley_Capitalism_and_Crime_Oct_2010.pdf)
We need not look far to notice stark differences in recorded crime between societies expressing
different forms of capitalism. If we start by looking at relatively reliable, comparable indicators such
as homicide rates (crimes of this sort tend to get noticed and reported as well as being fairly similar
across cultures) the differences should become apparent. The average homicide rate in the EU was
1.59 per 100,000 between 1999 and 2001 with countries like Germany, Sweden and Austria falling
below this level, this provides stark contrast to levels 5.56 per 100,000 in the USA (Hall, Forthcoming).
Incidentally, Japan had a homicide rate of 1.08 offences per 100,000 in 1995 (Finch, 2001: 220), so
despite being a post-industrial nation that was occupied by the Americans for a number of years
Japanese murder rates resemble European levels. Thus we see pronounced differences between the
areas under examination and between ideologies. What is striking, however, is the heightened
criminality of the neo-liberal nations. The idea that certain types of capitalism might influence people
into deviant behaviour is not new, several theorists from the 19th and early 20th centuries (the era of
classical liberalism) noticed many similar problems to those we are beginning to recognise today.
Young (cited in Lea et al, 1996) provides a useful summary of Engels views on the crime problem in
capitalist societies. He puts forward a four-fold distinction of individual adaptation to encroaching
capitalism. Firstly, the individual can “become so brutalised so as to be, in effect, a determined
creature” (Ibid), secondly, he or she can accept and engage with capitalism wholeheartedly, thirdly he
or she can turn to crime or, finally, struggle for socialism. Although a little simplistic in its analysis,
particularly in its assumption that the poor will ‘steal the property of the rich’ when today we have
noticed that much crime is intra rather than inter-class, it remains useful. Brutalisation, it appears, occurs
simply because of the demoralising effects of the treatment of the working class by the bourgeoisie,
being treated as something subhuman may lead inexorably to criminality, at least according to Engels.
Those who accept capitalism will find themselves living a life where they are separated from their
fellow man in a “dissolution of mankind into monads” (Ibid, 2). Engels argued that this dissolution
would breed individuals who care for nothing but personal interest and advancement. As a
consequence many of these people were no longer capable of settling interpersonal differences
amicably and would resort to violence and the law courts. Thus even those who accept capitalism are
in Engels’ view not beyond turning to crime. He even argues that rising crime under capitalism is an
essential factor in stimulating a coming revolution. As the class-consciousness of the proletariat grows
they leave behind many forms of crime and yet maintain the motivation, their hatred of the bourgeois
hegemony. According to Engels, rising crime rates are a healthy sign, a sign that he and Karl Marx
were right to predict a revolution. If we move back to the present day, we know this revolution never
came about most likely because Engels underestimated the power of Victorian social reform and the
levels of subscription to the bourgeois ideal and did not foresee state subscription to Keynesian
economics.
Capitalism isolates and demoralizes individuals
Horsley 10 (May 2006.
Mark Horsley: Degree in Criminology from Northumbria University. Internet Journal of Criminology. “Capitalism
and Crime: The Criminogenic Potential of the Free Market.” http://www.internetjournalofcriminology.com/Hors
ley_Capitalism_and_Crime_Oct_2010.pdf)
Willem Bonger (2003 [1916]) also wrote on this topic during the early 20th century. He proposed that
a ‘favourable environment’ could prevent egoistic acts but an economic system based upon exchange
instead of utility “cannot fail to have an egoistic character” (ibid. 58). Bonger thought that a society
based on exchange would isolate individuals from each other by “weakening the bonds that unite
them” (Ibid.). The primary bond between individuals in early capitalist society was a sense of shared
interest and common fate, but (neoliberal) capitalism might actually dismantle this bond by forcing
people to compete with each other for work, income and social position. It seems quite obvious that
this all sounds very normal in the present day and is no more than a statement of reality but we must
remember that this economic type was still relatively new at the beginning of the 20th century.
Bonger’s explanations for the rise of social inequality and for the demoralising effect that capitalism
can have on individuals arose from the necessity of labour to capitalist production and in particular
the need of the producer to purchase labour (and from the labourer’s need to sell). Bonger argues
that people are forced to sell their labour to avoid starvation, which, in most cases, does not enter the
equation now because of the remnants of our welfare state. However, it is still the case that we need
to work to provide for ourselves, thus Bonger’s idea that this situation gives rise to exploitation may
still be relevant. “Little by little one class of men has become accustomed to think that the others are
destined to amass wealth for them” (Ibid. 60), this, thought Bonger, demoralises both the producer
and the labourer. In the producer it creates greed and a disregard for those under his or her charge
who are seen solely as profit making machines. In the labouring classes it creates feelings of insecurity
and demoralisation because there is always a surplus of labour with which we can be threatened if we
fail to live up to expectations.
Impact – Environment
The function of capitalism requires a consistent environmental cycle of abuse, repair,
and expand that necessitate ecological collapse.
Strong ’11 (Edward Strong, Writer on Socialistic Ideals, May 10th, 2011, Environmental Destruction is
in Capitalism’s DNA, http://ed-strong.com/environmental-destruction-is-in-capitalisms-dna)
Capitalism as a system of rifts and shifts. Rifts, because its reliance on short-term profit and endless
growth means it must drive an ever-deepening wedge between human society and the natural
conditions needed to sustain all life. Shifts, because when it’s confronted with environmental
degradation the system tends to simply move it elsewhere.¶ These shifts are often geographical —
toxic, polluting industries are moved out of urban areas or from the rich nations to the global South.
Another example is how the depletion of natural resources in one region merely drives capital to
expand its reach somewhere else in the globe.¶ The oil industry, which has expanded offshore drilling
operations in the past few decades (think the Gulf of Mexico) and now wants to drill for oil in the
relatively untouched Arctic Ocean, is a classic example of this kind of geographical shifting characteristic
of capitalism.¶ But the shifts are also technological. Capitalism has typically responded to
environmental problems and resource depletion with technical changes in the methods of production:
wood-burning substituted for coal-burning, natural fertiliser for synthetic fertiliser, paper for plastic,
conventional oil for biofuels, and fossil fuel power plants for nuclear power plants.¶ These changes
have opened up new profitable markets but have also created new, and more pressing, ecological rifts.¶
One way to look at this is to see capitalism as a bubble economy, which uses up environmental
resources and the absorptive capacity of the environment while displacing the costs back on Earth itself,
this incurring an enormous ecological debt.¶ As long as the system is relatively small and can keep
expanding outwardly, this ecological debt is displaced, often without any recognition of the costs that
have been incurred.¶ Once the economic system begins to approach not just its regional boundaries
but planetary boundaries, the mounting ecological debt will become ever more precarious,
threatening an ecological crash.¶ Yet the nearness of this crash won’t prompt the system’s rulers to
change course. Environmental destruction is part of capitalism’s DNA.¶ Capitalism is incapable of
regulating its social metabolism with nature in an environmentally sustainable manner. Its very
operations violate the laws of restitution and metabolic restoration.¶ The constant drive to renew the
capital accumulation process intensifies its destructive social metabolism, imposing the needs of
capital on nature, regardless of the consequences to natural systems.¶ Capitalism continues to play out
the same failed strategy again and again. The solution to each environmental problem generates new
environmental problems (and often does not curtail the old ones).¶ One crisis follows another in an
endless succession of failure, stemming from the internal contradictions of the system. If we are to
solve our environmental crises, we need to go to the root of the problem: the social relations of
capital itself.¶ Mainstream environmental commentators and groups resist this conclusion. Although
they may be harshly critical of the environmental destruction, they limit their proposals to what is
feasible within the framework of the capitalist system.¶ Sometimes this is justified on pragmatic grounds
that the ecological crisis is so advanced that we don’t have time to change the system, and so we need
to work within the flawed system we’ve got.¶ Others have been convinced by the neoliberal argument
that capitalism can be made green and serve ecologically sensible outcomes — the idea that once
environmental goods are adequately priced, preserving ecosystems can be made profitable and the
market could become the saviour, rather than the destroyer, of the planet.¶ Yet others still may
acknowledge capitalism’s anti-ecological features, but are either pessimistic about the potential to
change society or think that any other social system would be even worse.
Capitalism is the root cause of Global Warming and the destruction of the
environment
Chris ’08 (N. Chris Writer of Socialist and Capitalistic ideals, December 21st, 2008, Capitalism and
Environmental Destruction, http://www.angelfire.com/co2/socialism/theenvironment.html)
People often wonder about the environmental movement and its inability to effect a discernable change
upon the devestation done to the environment due to the corporate pursuit of profit. Advocates of high
ecology argue that we must return to a more austere way of living, that the benefits of modern
technology must be given up and we must all take voluntary vows of poverty to accomadate the needs
of nature. Centuries of Christian ideology and the capitalist mindset have convinced us that humankind
is above nature, and that nature's needs must accede to the needs of the dominant lifeform on Earth.
Now, we are collectively paying for this, as the environment continues to decline, the ozone layer is
depleted more every day and cancer-causing chemicals invade our water and poisonous pesticides are
introduced into our food. Not to mention the nuclear waste that piles up as industry refuses to find
safer sources of energy due to the nature of financial expense and the harmful genetic engineering
that thrNeatens to create new organisms that are not an accepted part of nature. Many high ecology
advocates would exclaim that human civilazation itself is the cause of this destruction, and that the
Industrial Revolution and the enormous amounts of waste it produces are to blame. In actuality,
however, it is merely the capitalist mode of production that deserves the finger pointing, not the
human race and its accompanying technology. One must understand the true nature of our economic
laws to fully understand why the existence of the human race appears to be in opposition to the rest of
nature. As socialists will correctly point out, it's not humanity that is the problem, but rather the way our
current system of production for profit works. To do this, a brief recap of why production under
capitalism occurs is in order.
Even worse, the working class is blackmailed into choosing between jobs or the environment, i.e., they
are told that in order to bear the costs of implementing expensive safety measures for the safe disposal
of waste, downsizing on jobs must occur. Faced with this Catch-22 situation, and being dependent
upon the capitalist class for their wages, the working class usually decides to keep their jobs and pray
that the resulting environmental damage won't destroy human life on the planet during their lifetime,
or cause horrific outbreaks of cancer and other diseases on the next generation. We can only hope
that things do not get too bad in the next few decades, and that the planet Earth will continue to be able
to sustain us and to continue to protect us from the harmful radiation that the ozone layer normally
keeps from hitting the Earth. Never is capitalism blamed for the problem. Instead, we are told that the
causes are unknown, that they are an unavoidable fact of living in an industrialized world, or that
humankind is naturally "evil" and that our dominance of the Earth is to be expected and even
encouraged for metaphysical reasons.
Capitalism causes ecological imperialism which allows us to destroy the environment
in the constant quest for more material gain
Clark and Foster 2003, Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism( John Bellamy, Brett,
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5iQCF3I1jmIC&oi=fnd&pg=PR65&dq=against+capitalism
&ots=GoKOisz0Fk&sig=nCg8NlDGrG6Zrp-AHFoQs6riq2E#v=onepage&q=against%20capitalism&f=false,
A.N.)
In the spring of 2003 the United States, backed by Britain, invaded Iraq, a¶ country with the second
largest oil reserves in the world. The United States¶ is now working to expand Iraqi oil production,
while securing for itself an¶ increasingly dominant position in the control of this crucial resource as
part of¶ its larger economic and geopolitical strategy. Earlier, the same US administration¶ that
invaded Iraq had pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, designed to limit the¶ growth in the emissions of
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases responsible¶ for global warming – a phenomenon
threatening all life as we know it. It¶ is no wonder, then, that the last few years have seen a growth of
concern about¶ ecological imperialism, which in many eyes has become as significant as the more¶
familiar political, economic and cultural forms of imperialism to which it is¶ related.¶ In 1986 Alfred
Crosby published a work entitled Ecological Imperialism: The¶ Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900,
that described the destruction wrought¶ on indigenous environments – most often inadvertently – by
the European colonization¶ of much of the rest of the world.1 Old World flora and fauna¶ introduced
into New World environments experienced demographic explosions¶ with adverse effects on native
species. As the subtitle of Crosby’s book suggested,¶ his historical analysis dealt mainly with ‘biological
expansion’ and thus had no¶ direct concern with imperialism as a political-economic phenomenon. It
did not¶ consider how ecology might relate to the domination of the periphery of the¶ capitalist world
economy by the centre, or to rivalry between different capitalist¶ powers. Like the infectious diseases
that killed tens of millions of indigenous¶ peoples following Columbus’ landing in the Americas,
ecological imperialism in¶ this view worked as a purely biological force, following ‘encounters’
between¶ regions of the earth that had previously been separated geographically. Social¶ relations of
production were largely absent from this historical account.¶ The ecological problem under capitalism is
a complex one. An analysis at the¶ level of the entire globe is required. Ecological degradation at this
universal level¶ is related to the divisions within the world capitalist system, arising from the fact¶ that a
single world economy is nonetheless divided into numerous nation-states,¶ competing with each other
both directly and via their corporations. It is also¶ divided hierarchically into centre and periphery,
with nations occupying fundamentally¶ different positions in the international division of labour, and
in a¶ world-system of dominance and dependency.¶ All of this makes the analysis of ecological
imperialism complicated enough,¶ but understanding has also been impeded by the
underdevelopment of an ecological¶ materialist analysis of capitalism within Marxist theory as a
whole.2¶ Nevertheless, it has long been apparent – and was stipulated in Marx’s own work¶ – that
transfers in economic values are accompanied in complex ways by real¶ ‘material-ecological’ flows
that transform relations between city and country, and¶ between global metropolis and periphery.3
Control of such flows is a vital part¶ of competition between rival industrial and financial centres.
Ecological imperialism¶ thus presents itself most obviously in the following ways: the pillage of¶ the
resources of some countries by others and the transformation of whole¶ ecosystems upon which
states and nations depend; massive movements of population¶ and labour that are interconnected
with the extraction and transfer of¶ resources; the exploitation of ecological vulnerabilities of
societies to promote¶ imperialist control; the dumping of ecological wastes in ways that widen the¶
chasm between centre and periphery; and overall, the creation of a global ‘metabolic¶ rift’ that
characterizes the relation of capitalism to the environment, and at¶ the same time limits capitalist
development.¶ THE ‘METABOLIC
Capitalism devalues and guarantees the destruction of the environment
Foster ‘9 (John Bellamy Foster, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, November 2009,
The Paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction,
http://monthlyreview.org/2009/11/01/the-paradox-of-wealth-capitalism-and-ecological-destruction)
Here, it is important to understand that certain conceptual categories that Marx uses in his critique of
political economy, such as nature as a “free gift” and the labor theory of value itself, were inventions
of classical-liberal political economy that were integrated into Marx’s critique of classical political
economy — insofar as they exhibited the real tendencies and contradictions of the system. Marx
employed these concepts in an argument aimed at transcending bourgeois society and its limited social
categories. The idea that nature was a “free gift” for exploitation was explicitly advanced by the
physiocrats, and by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill — well before
Marx.18 Moreover, it has been perpetuated in mainstream economics long after Marx. Although
accepting it as a reality of bourgeois political economy, Marx was nevertheless well aware of the social
and ecological contradictions imbedded in such a view. Thus, in his Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63,he
repeatedly attacked Malthus for falling back on this “physiocratic notion” of the environment as “a gift
of nature to man,” while failing to recognize that the concrete appropriation of nature for production
— and the entire value framework built upon this in capitalist society — was, in fact, associated with
historically specific social relations.19 For Marx, with his emphasis on the need to protect the earth for
future generations, the capitalist expropriation of the environment as a free object simply pointed to
the contradiction between natural wealth and a system of accumulation of capital that systematically
“robbed” it.Nevertheless, since the treatment of nature as a “free gift” was intrinsic to the workings of
the capitalist economy, it continued to be included as a basic proposition underlying neoclassical
economics. It was repeated as an axiom in the work of the great late-nineteenth-century neoclassical
economist Alfred Marshall, and has continued to be advanced in orthodox economic textbooks. Hence,
the tenth edition (1987) of a widely used introductory textbook in economics by Campbell McConnell
states the following: “Land refers to all natural resources — all ‘free gifts of nature’ — which are
useable in the production process.” And farther along in the same book we find: “Land has no
production cost; it is a ‘free and nonreproducible gift of nature.’”20 Indeed, so crucial is this notion to
neoclassical economics that it continues to live on in mainstream environmental economics. For
example, Nick Hanley, Jason F. Shogren, and Ben White state in their influential Introduction to
Environmental Economics (2001) that “natural capital comprises all [free] gifts of nature.”21 Green
critics, with only the dimmest knowledge of classical political economy (or of neoclassical economics),
often focus negatively on Marx’s adherence to the labor theory of value — the notion that only labor
generated value. Yet it is important to remember that the labor theory of value was not confined to
Marx’s critique of political economy but constituted the entire basis of classical-liberal political
economy. Misconceptions pointing to the anti-ecological nature of the labor theory of value arise due to
conflation of the categories of value and wealth — since, in today’s received economics, these are
treated synonymously. It was none other than the Lauderdale Paradox, as we have seen, that led Say,
Mill, and others to abandon the autonomous category of wealth (use value) — helping to set the stage
for the neoclassical economic tradition that was to follow. In the capitalist logic, there was no question
that nature was valueless (i.e., a free gift). The problem, rather, was how to jettison the concept of
wealth, as distinct from value, from the core framework of economics, since it provided the basis of a
critical — and what we would now call “ecological” — outlook.
Impact – Ethics
Resisting this reliance on economic evaluation is the ultimate ethical responsibility –
the current social order guarantees social exclusion on a global scale
Zizek and Daly 2004 (Slavoj and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek page 14-16)
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize
that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global
capitalism and its obscene naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it
throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture – with all its pieties
concerning ‘multiculturalist’ etiquette – Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called ‘radically
incorrect’ in the sense that it break with these types of positions 7 and focuses instead on the very
organizing principles of today’s social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires
some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost fetishistic
economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and
more recently Laclau and Mouffee, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the
transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem
that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties
surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as
a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian
twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of
contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears).
This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek’s point is rather that in
rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and
destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx’s
central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal
the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system.
What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the
gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose ‘universalism’ fundamentally reproduces and
depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world’s populations. In this way,
neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and
losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place.
Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions,
but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the
human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded ‘life-chances’ cannot be calculated
within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and
nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’). And Zizek’s point is that this
mystification is magnified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and
negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of
differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political
boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle.
Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact
that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true
that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular
embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizek’s universalism is that it would
not attempt to conceal this fact or reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a ‘glitch’ in an
otherwise sound matrix.
Impact – Human Rights
Capitalism has taken away human rights, things that are unnatural are what we are
born with and things that we are supposed to be born with are things that are looked
at as a part of culture
Zizek 2005, (Slavoj, Against Human Rights, reifiedrecords.com, A.N.)
Contemporary appeals to human rights within our liberal-capitalist societies generally rest upon three
assumptions. First, that such appeals function in opposition to modes of fundamentalism that would
naturalize or essentialize contingent, historically conditioned traits. Second, that the two most basic
rights are freedom of choice, and the right to dedicate one’s life to the pursuit of pleasure (rather than
to sacrifice it for some higher ideological cause). And third, that an appeal to human rights may form
the basis for a defence against the ‘excess of power’. Let us begin with fundamentalism. Here, the evil
(to paraphrase Hegel) often dwells in the gaze that perceives it. Take the Balkans during the 1990s, the
site of widespread human-rights violations. At what point did the Balkans—a geographical region of
South-Eastern Europe—become ‘Balkan’, with all that designates for the European ideological imaginary
today? The answer is: the mid-19th century, just as the Balkans were being fully exposed to the effects
of European modernization. The gap between earlier Western European perceptions and the ‘modern’
image is striking. Already in the 16th century the French naturalist Pierre Belon could note that ‘the
Turks force no one to live like a Turk’. Small surprise, then, that so many Jews found asylum and
religious freedom in Turkey and other Muslim countries after Ferdinand and Isabella had expelled them
from Spain in 1492—with the result that, in a supreme twist of irony, Western travellers were disturbed
by the public presence of Jews in big Turkish cities. Here, from a long series of examples, is a report from
N. Bisani, an Italian who visited Istanbul in 1788: A stranger, who has beheld the intolerance of London
and Paris, must be much surprised to see a church here between a mosque and a synagogue, and a
dervish by the side of a Capuchin friar. I know not how this government can have admitted into its
bosom religions so opposite to its own. It must be from degeneracy of Mahommedanism, that this
happy contrast can be produced. What is still more astonishing is to find that this spirit of toleration is
generally prevalent among the people; for here you see Turks, Jews, Catholics, Armenians, Greeks and
Protestants conversing together on subjects of business or pleasure with as much harmony and goodwill
as if they were of the same country and religion. [1] The very feature that the West today celebrates as
the sign of its cultural superiority— the spirit and practice of multicultural tolerance—is thus
dismissed as an effect of Islamic ‘degeneracy’. The strange fate of the Trappist monks of Etoile Marie is
equally telling. Expelled from France by the Napoleonic regime, they settled in Germany, but were
driven out in 1868. Since no other Christian state would take them, they asked the Sultan’s permission
to buy land near Banja Luka, in the Serb part of today’s Bosnia, where they lived happily ever after—
until they got caught in the Balkan conflicts between Christians. Where, then, did the fundamentalist
features—religious intolerance, ethnic violence, fixation upon historical trauma—which the West now
associates with ‘the Balkan’, originate? Clearly, from the West itself. In a neat instance of Hegel’s
‘reflexive determination’, what Western Europeans observe and deplore in the Balkans is what they
themselves introduced there; what they combat is their own historical legacy run amok. Let us not
forget that the two great ethnic crimes imputed to the Turks in the 20th century—the Armenian
genocide and the persecution of the Kurds—were not committed by traditionalist Muslim political
forces, but by the military modernizers who sought to cut Turkey loose from its old-world ballast and
turn it into a European nation-state. Mladen Dolar’s old quip, based on a detailed reading of Freud’s
references to the region, that the European unconscious is structured like the Balkans, is thus literally
true: in the guise of the Otherness of ‘Balkan’, Europe takes cognizance of the ‘stranger in itself’, of its
own repressed. But we might also examine the ways in which the ‘fundamentalist’ essentialization of
contingent traits is itself a feature of liberal-capitalist democracy. It is fashionable to complain that
private life is threatened or even disappearing, in face of the media’s ability to expose one’s most
intimate personal details to the public. True, on condition that we turn things around: what is effectively
disappearing here is public life itself, the public sphere proper, in which one operates as a symbolic
agent who cannot be reduced to a private individual, to a bundle of personal attributes, desires, traumas
and idiosyncrasies. The ‘risk society’ commonplace— according to which the contemporary individual
experiences himself as thoroughly ‘denaturalized’, regarding even his most ‘natural’ traits, from
ethnic identity to sexual preference, as being chosen, historically contingent, learned—is thus
profoundly deceiving. What we are witnessing today is the opposite process: an unprecedented renaturalization. All big ‘public issues’ are now translated into attitudes towards the regulation of ‘natural’
or ‘personal’ idiosyncrasies. This explains why, at a more general level, pseudo-naturalized
ethnoreligious conflicts are the form of struggle which best suits global capitalism. In the age of ‘postpolitics’, when politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration, the sole
remaining legitimate sources of conflict are cultural (religious) or natural (ethnic) tensions. And
‘evaluation’ is precisely the regulation of social promotion that fits with this re-naturalization. Perhaps
the time has come to reassert, as the truth of evaluation, the perverted logic to which Marx refers
ironically in his description of commodity fetishism, quoting Dogberry’s advice to Seacoal at the end
of Capital’s Chapter 1: ‘To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes
by nature.’ To be a computer expert or a successful manager is a gift of nature today, but lovely lips or
eyes are a fact of culture.
Impact – Patriarchy
Capitalism causes gender inequality
Cockburn, 2009 (The Machinery of Dominance: Women Men And Technical Know-How, the Women’s
Studies Quarterly, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/27655158, A.N.)
A quarter century has passed since I wrote The Machinery of Dominance. Back then, socialist feminists
were struggling to understand the connection be tween capitalism and patriarchy, as social systems.
Heidi Hartmann's "The Unhappy Marriage of Capitalism and Patriarchy" (Hartmann 1981) came out
while I was writing this, Zillah Eisenstein's Capitalist Patriarchy (Eisen stein 1979) had appeared two
years before. One system or two? How re lated? That conceptual project was tough. Mid-eighties we
abandoned it. Still today we haven't got it sorted. Meantime, what I was doing in Machinery of
Dominance (Cockburn 1985), it now seems, was showing how, if you get right down to the level of
cultures?cultures of the workplace and its labor processes, cultures in which technologies are invented
and put to work?it isn't difficult at all to see the relations of capitalism and patriarchy being produced
and reproduced simultaneously. The book starts by trying to grasp the significance of technology as a
medium of power. In the early eighties we were fresh out of the feminist "Capital reading groups." We
understood the contradictions and tensions between the interests of the capitalist, the skilled worker
and the unskilled laborer. We understood the importance of that special category of worker that had
historically garnered the creative, transferable skills of engineering, the one who uniquely was able to
design and control the instruments of labor, owned by the capitalist, that shaped and disciplined the
labor processes of the ordinary worker. We saw his contradictory class position. He was the only one
whose job and earnings weren't threatened as one new machine after another revolutionized the
factories. The difference was, we feminist readers of Capital noticed the "he" in the story of the
technologist. We were helping each other understand and boldly assert that power is more complex
than it appears in Capital. Pow er had been flowing and thrusting over the long haul of history not only
[WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 37: 1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2009)] ? 2009 by Cynthia Cockburn. All
rights reserved. 269 2 7 0 ON THE MACHINERY OE DOMINANCE through precapitalist and capitalist
class relations but also through patriar chal gender relations.There was economic power and there
was sex/gender power. If you took a feminist lens to the unedifying sight of human relations in Marx's
mid-nineteenth century, it was not just capitalism unleashed you were looking at, but also brute male
power. The steam-powered tools had huge significance for the owners of the means of production,
but they had utility too for men as men.
Impact – Poverty
Capitalism is the root cause for poverty in the US
Richard D. Wolff, ’11 (Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, “Capitalism
and Poverty.” Visiting Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School
University in New York, New Departures in Marxian Theory (Routledge, 2006, Capitalism Hits the Fan,
Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do about It, Economic Update,
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/wolff111011.html, be)
Poverty is deepening. The gap between rich
and poor is growing. Slippage soon into the ranks of the poor now confronts tens of millions of
Americans who long thought of themselves as securely "middle class." The reality is worse than the Census Bureau
The US Census Bureau recently reported what most Americans already knew.
reports. Consider that the Bureau's poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314. Families of four making more than that were not
counted as poor. That poverty line works out to $15 per day per person for everything: food, clothing, housing, medical care, transportation,
education, and so on. If you have more than $15 per day per person in your household to pay for everything each person needs, the Bureau
the real number of US citizens living in poverty -- more
is much larger today than the 46.2 million reported by the Census Bureau. It is thus
much higher than the 15.1 per cent of our people the Bureau sees as poor. Conservatively estimated,
about one in four Americans already lives in real poverty. Another one in four is or should be worried about joining
does not count you as part of this country's poverty problem. So
reasonably defined --
them soon. Long-lasting and high unemployment now drains away income from families and friends of the unemployed who have used up
savings as well as unemployment insurance. As city, state, and local governments cut services and supports, people will have to divert money
to offset part of those cuts. When Medicare and if Social Security benefits are cut, millions will be spending more to help elderly parents.
poverty looms for those with jobs as (1) wages are cut or fail to keep up with rising prices, and
(2) benefits -- especially pensions and medical insurance -- are reduced. Deepening poverty has
multiple causes, but the capitalist economic system is major among them. First, capitalism's periodic
crises always increase poverty, and the current crisis is no exception. More precisely, how capitalist
corporations operate, in or out of crisis, regularly reproduces poverty. At the top of every corporation, its major shareholders
Finally,
(15-20 or fewer) own controlling blocs of shares. They select a board of directors -- usually 15-20 individuals -- who run the corporation. These
two tiny groups make all the key decisions: what, how, and where to produce and what to do with the profits.
Poverty is one result of
this capitalist type of enterprise organization.
For example, corporate decisions generally aim to lower the number of
workers or their wages or both. They automate, export (outsource) jobs, and replace higher-paid workers by recruiting domestic and foreign
substitutes willing to work for less. These normal corporate actions generate rising poverty as the other side of rising profits. When poverty
workers tend to accept what employers dish out to avoid losing jobs and
falling into poverty. Another major corporate goal is to control politics. Wherever all citizens can vote, workers'
and its miseries "remain always with us,"
interests might prevail over those of directors and shareholders in elections. To prevent that, corporations devote portions of their revenues to
finance politicians, parties, mass media, and
"think tanks."
Their
goal is to "shape public opinion" and control what
government does.
They do not want Washington's crisis-driven budget deficits and national debts to be overcome by big tax increases
on corporations and the rich. Instead public discussion and politicians' actions are kept focused chiefly on cutting social programs for the
Corporate goals include providing high and rising salaries, stock options, and bonuses to top
executives and rising dividends and share prices to shareholders. The less paid to the workers who actually produce
majority.
what corporations sell, the more corporate revenue goes to satisfy directors, top managers, and major shareholders. Corporations also raise
profits regularly by increasing prices and/or cutting production costs (often by compromising output quality).
Higher priced and
poorer-quality goods are sold mostly to working people.
This too pushes them toward poverty just like lower wages and
benefits and government service cuts. Over the years, government interventions like Social Security, Medicare, minimum wage laws,
regulations, etc. never sufficed to eradicate poverty. They often helped the poor, but they never ended poverty. The same applies to charities
aiding the poor. Poverty always remained. Now capitalism's
government interventions or charity is required to end poverty.
crisis worsens it again.
Something more than
Poverty outweighs nuclear war
Gilligan 2000
James Gilligan, Dpartment of Psychiatry Harvard Medical School, VIOLENCE: REFLECTIONS ON OUR
DEADLIEST EPIDEMIC, 2000, p 195-196.
The 14 to 18 million deaths a year cause by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths
per year from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the
frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II (an estimated
49 million military and civilian deaths, including those caused by genocide--or about eight million per
year, 1935-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-1966 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the Vietnam war
(possibly two million, 1954- 1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the
U.S.S.R (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence,
which continues year after year. In other word, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die
because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and
every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were
killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an
ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetrated on the weak
and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world.
Impact – Terrorism
Terrorism is a direct response to the growth of market capitalism
Cronin 03- Senior Associate at the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changin Character of War
(Audrey Kurth, “Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism”, Project MUSE)
Whether deliberately intending to or not, the United States is projecting un- coordinated economic,
social, and political power even more sweepingly than it is in military terms. Globalization, in forms
including Westernization, sec-ularization, democratization, consumerism, and the growth of market
capitalism, represents an onslaught to less privileged people in conservative cultures repelled by the
fundamental changes that these forces are bringing—or angered by the distortions and uneven
distributions of benefits that result. This [End Page 45] is especially true of the Arab world. Yet the
current U.S. approach to this growing repulsion is colored by a kind of cultural naïveté, an
unwillingness to recognize—let alone appreciate or take responsibility for—the influence of U.S.
power except in its military dimension. Even doing nothing in the economic, social, and political policy
realms is still doing something, because the United States is blamed by disadvantaged and alienated
populations for the powerful Western-led forces of globalization that are proceeding apace, despite
the absence of a focused, coordinated U.S. policy. And those penetrating mechanisms of globalization,
such as the internet, the media, and the increasing flows of goods and peoples, are exploited in
return. Both the means and ends of terrorism are being reformulated in the current environment.
Terrorism is only backlash to western globalization- terror is an attempt to disrupt the
capitalist order
Cronin 03- Senior Associate at the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changin Character of War
(Audrey Kurth, “Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism”, Project MUSE)
The objectives of international terrorism have also changed as a result of globalization. Foreign
intrusions and growing awareness of shrinking global space have created incentives to use the ideal
asymmetrical weapon, terrorism, for more ambitious purposes. The political incentives to attack major
targets such as the United States with powerful weapons have greatly increased. The perceived
corruption of indigenous customs, religions, languages, economies, and so on are blamed on an
international system often unconsciously molded by American behavior. The accompanying
distortions in local communities as a result of exposure to the global marketplace of goods and ideas
are increasingly blamed on U.S.- sponsored modernization and those who support it. The advancement
of technology, however, is not the driving force behind the terrorist threat to the United States and its
allies, despite what some have assumed. Instead, at the heart of this threat are frustrated populations
and international movements that are increasingly inclined to lash out against U.S.-led globalization.
As Christopher Coker observes, globalization is reducing tendencies toward instrumental violence (i.e.,
violence between states and even between communities), but it is enhancing incentives for expressive
violence (or violence that is ritualistic, symbolic, and communicative). The new international terrorism
is [End Page 51] increasingly engendered by a need to assert identity or meaning against forces of
homogeneity, especially on the part of cultures that are threatened by, or left behind by, the secular
future that Western-led globalization brings. According to a report recently published by the United
Nations Development Programme, the region of greatest deficit in measures of human development—
the Arab world—is also the heart of the most threatening religiously inspired terrorism. Much more
work needs to be done on the significance of this correlation, but increasingly sources of political
discontent are arising from disenfranchised areas in the Arab world that feel left behind by the promise
of globalization and its assurances of broader freedom, prosperity, and access to knowledge. The
results are dashed expectations, heightened resentment of the perceived U.S.-led hegemonic system,
and a shift of focus away from more proximate targets within the region. Of course, the motivations
behind this threat should not be oversimplified: Anti-American terrorism is spurred in part by a desire to
change U.S. policy in the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions as well as by growing antipathy in the
developing world vis-à-vis the forces of globalization. It is also crucial to distinguish between the
motivations of leaders such as Osama bin Laden and their followers. The former seem to be more driven
by calculated strategic decisions to shift the locus of attack away from repressive indigenous
governments to the more attractive and media-rich target of the United States. The latter appear to be
more driven by religious concepts cleverly distorted to arouse anger and passion in societies full of pentup frustration. To some degree, terrorism is directed against the United States because of its
engagement and policies in various regions. Anti-Americanism is closely related to antiglobalization,
because (intentionally or not) the primary driver of the powerful forces resulting in globalization is the
United States. Analyzing terrorism as something separate from globalization is misleading and
potentially dangerous. Indeed globalization and terrorism are intricately intertwined forces
characterizing international security in the twenty-first century. The main question is whether
terrorism will succeed in disrupting the [End Page 52] promise of improved livelihoods for millions of
people on Earth. Globalization is not an inevitable, linear development, and it can be disrupted by
such unconventional means as international terrorism. Conversely, modern international terrorism is
especially dangerous because of the power that it potentially derives from globalization—whether
through access to CBNR weapons, global media outreach, or a diverse network of financial and
information resources.
Impact – Root Cause of War
Capitalism has been the root cause of every war in the last two centuries
Packer, ongstanding member of the Trotskyist movement in Britain. Packer has held a number of leadership roles in the International Socialist Group and the
Fourth International. Dave is a former editor of Socialist Outlook, ’03 (David, Autumn, “Capitalism means War”, http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article10) CW
This article looks at the specific nature
of capitalism’s way of war, its origins and briefly compares it with other social systems. The
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are just the beginning of a new aggressive, militarist phase of
imperialism, which can only be halted by the mobilised resistance of the peoples of the world, in
particular the working classes in the imperialist centres themselves. The twentieth century was the
bloodiest century in human history, easily exceeding the previous record, held by the nineteenth century, which began most notably with the
Napoleonic wars. During these two centuries, the capitalist world was marked by the rise of competing
imperialisms, at first in Europe but soon joined by the USA and Japan. Between 1876 and 1914
European powers annexed approximately eleven million square miles of territory, mainly in Asia and
Africa. By the twentieth century, inter-imperialist competition for colonies and markets was to drag
nearly the entire world into two devastating world wars, with over one hundred and sixty additional
wars since the end of World War Two. For the first time war was perceived as ‘total war’ - war by any
means necessary. It would range across the whole world and included saturation bombings and mass
murder of civilians. The First World War resulted in huge casualties in the trenches, far exceeding the
Napoleonic Wars, with ordinary working class soldiers cynically used as cannon fodder. Ten million
were killed with millions more wounded and maimed. However, with the bombing of Guernica during
the Spanish Civil War by the Nazis, a new chapter in the development of weapons of mass destruction
was opened. This atrocity was followed by the blitz on London, and even more devastatingly, the appalling bombing and firestorm destruction of life and
property in Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and Tokyo. It was a strategy that culminated in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki while Japan was
attempting to surrender. These saturation bombings were not directed against military or even economic targets, but were calculated acts of terror aimed at the
civilian populations. Of the tens of thousands killed during one night in Hamburg, the overwhelming majority of the dead were non-combatant women, children and
the old. This, and other similar war crimes, was the action of British Bomber Command led by ‘Bomber’ Harris and endorsed by Churchill. To these
crimes
can be added the greatest crime of the century, the mass genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. In all, fifty
million people died as a result of the Second World War, while in the numerous wars since 1945, it is
estimated that another twenty-five million people have been killed. It has also been estimated that
civilians account for approximately 75% of all war deaths in this century. ‘Total war’ has exceeded the
destruction levels and loss of life of all the previous wars in history taken together. With the
emergence of the United States as the victor and the overwhelmingly dominant world imperialist
power, after the defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan, ‘total war’ continues to achieve similar levels of
horror, if on a smaller scale (so far). In the Vietnam War, American imperialism did not hesitate to
massacre civilians with cluster bombs and saturation bombings, or destroy the countryside and its
agriculture with napalm and deadly chemicals defoliant such as Agent Orange. The devastating effects
of which can still be seen in Vietnam today in both agriculture and in the continuing health problems
of its people. Despite the old propaganda about defending the free world, first against Communism,
and now against terrorists, while seeking out only military targets with smart bombs, the devastation
in Iraq and Afghanistan tells another story. The first Gulf War, also witnessed atrocities, 20,000 Iraqi
solders retreating on the Basra Road – in disarray and unable to defend themselves - were massacred
almost down to the last man with napalm bombs. Mile after mile of burnt out vehicles with the
remains of incinerated human beings in contorted postures were found, the images too horrifying to
be reported in the western media, but fortunately the evidence for this war crime was documented
and independently published by some BBC camera crews. The murderous US pilots cynically called the Basra Road massacre a
‘turkey-shoot’.
Alternative – Occupy Solves
The alternative is to devolve production to the working class. Collectively and
democratically taking control of enterprise resolves crisis of capitalism.
Wolf 2011
(Richard D. Wolff is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and also a Visiting Professor at the
Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York, “Capitalism and Poverty”,
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/wolff111011.html) MattG
One solution: production would have to be organized differently, in a non-capitalist way. Instead of
enterprise decisions being made by directors and major shareholders, the workers themselves could
collectively and democratically make them. Let's call this Democracy at Work (DAW), since it entails
the majority making the key enterprise decisions about what, how, and where to produce and what to
do with the profits. If the workers made those decisions, here are some likely results. Primary goals
would no longer be to reduce their own numbers or their wages. If technological changes or reduced
demand for their outputs required fewer workers, they would likely maintain the wages of workers
and retrain them for other jobs meeting growing demands. Workers would not be fired and thereby
pushed into poverty. Second, workers making democratic decisions would not likely allow today's
huge differences between average wages and top managers' salaries, bonuses, etc. By eliminating
concentrated income and accumulated wealth at the top, resources would be freed finally to end
poverty at the bottom. A DAW system could produce and secure the vast "middle class" that this
country pretended but never yet really had. Workers disposing of their enterprises' profits would no
longer distribute a portion to politicians and parties to protect a rich minority against the envy and
resentments of the majority. By establishing a far more egalitarian income distribution, a DAW system
could also transform a political system now corrupted by the money of corporations and the rich.
Third, a DAW system would be less likely to raise prices or reduce output quality. When workers are
both decision-makers at work as well as consumers of their enterprises' outputs, they would more
likely pass and sustain laws to outlaw the price gouging and quality deterioration common in
capitalism. A serious commitment to end poverty and its costly social effects requires us to face that
capitalism has always reproduced widespread poverty as the other side of profits for a relative few. No
wonder such a system has provoked Occupy Wall Street and so many of its signature slogans and
demands.
The alternative is a microgesture of resistance – a negative ballot symbolizes an
alliance of bodies to disrupt the flow of capital
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, May 19, 2012,( http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/southsouth/indefense-of-spontaneous-contestation-andor-beauty/, In Defense of Spontaneous Contestation
and/or Beauty, In New Inquiry)
His starting point: design is a marker and site for neoliberal markets. One might choose to read
‘design’ broadly as self-enclosed, highly produced spaces, ergo your basic mall, museum, amusement
park, or sports arena. If design is a repository for obscured market power, Ricardo
reasoned, then those lacking power could intervene with ‘microgestures’ that allow
power to stage itself. In 1985 he performed such a microgesture at a site he viewed as part of an
‘exit culture’ of Disneyfied commodity exchange. He bought various packaged commodities—toys
and electronics and so forth—but instead of going home he opened them at the exit door of a mall
and began displaying and playing with them. Soon a crowd would gather, which inevitably set off
mall security and then the police. The kind of person who acquires packaged goods but doesn’t go
home is typically a war vet, drug dealer, or homeless person, all of whom invite police attention
because they are perceived to be trespassers. Bodies that deny the process of flow—by now it is as
common to hear move along, there’s nothing to see here in colloquial form as it is to read it in a
volume of French theory—are considered a blockage. Ricardo’s body became an instant site of
blockage as a community of people formed around him at precisely the designated exit point at a
shopping mall. He describes this—completely seriously, I might add—as an act of sabotage,
accounting for the origin of the word ‘saboteur’ as women factory workers who wore
wooden sabots at the mill so they could stick them in the machines (Fr. saboter, ‘kick with sabots,
willfully destroy’ During the Industrial Revolution, machines replaced workers at an
alarming rate throughout Europe, and the once stable economy of guild and craft shop
members who had performed manual labor for generations found their very welfare
threatened. To protest machine replacement of workers, the workers would toss their
shoes into the machine works to make them stop—sabotage. Since his work in the 1980s
with the Critical Art Ensemble and the Electronic Disturbance Theater Ricardo and his cohort
have explained streets as dead capital. The streets’ primary design is to aid the flow of people and
traffic, and even minor blockages such as the mall exit experiment are bound to perk up the antenna
of even the laziest squad patrol. If flesh-and-blood bodies are being subjected to
unprecedented curbs on freedom of movement and assembly, then a virtual alliance
with data-bodies retains the possibility to return some power back to the
disenfranchised: ‘[W]e put forth our idea that all digital actions must be part of
parallel street action. That via transparency and simulations data bodies and real
bodies could act in unison.’ This seems inarguable, especially given how (1) activists
have at least since the 2004 DNC and RNC conventions coordinated their real-bodies
via TXTMobbing, a technology developed for communicating and reporting in real-time in 160
characters, a direct predecessor to Twitter, Inc., and continue to do so on an exponential level, (2)
popular awareness about virtual networks of hackers, hacker cultures, and the liquid
potential of the web (e.g. Anonymous, LulzSec, Wikileaks) seems more diffuse than ever, and (3)
allegiance and retaliation for the wrongs done to real-body activists by police, the FBI,
the Justice Department, among others, have often been exacted by data-body activists—in fact,
sometimes those wrongs are so egregious and the inculcated parties so powerless that
appealing to collectives like Anonymous has became a foreseeable form of realbody/data-body solidarity.
Occupy to overthrow authoritarian structures. We are key to true democracy and
social justice.
BOP in 2011
(Bureau of Public Secrets, “The Awakening in America”, http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/awakening.htm, rcheek)
While the movement is eclectic and open to everyone, it is safe to say that its underlying spirit is
strongly antiauthoritarian, drawing inspiration not only from recent popular movements in
Argentina, Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain and other countries, but from anarchist and
situationist theories and tactics. As the editor of Adbusters (one of the groups that helped initiate the movement) noted: We are
not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the
Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the
first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all
over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the
philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote The Society of the Spectacle. The idea is that if you
have a very powerful meme — a very powerful idea — and the moment is ripe, then that is
enough to ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come out of. The May 1968 revolt in France was in fact also an “occupation
movement” — one of its most notable features was the occupation of the Sorbonne and other public buildings, which then inspired the occupation of factories all
over the country by more than 10 million workers. (Needless to say, we are still very far from something like that, which can hardly happen until American
As the movement spreads to
hundreds of cities, it is important to note that each of the new occupations and assemblies
remains totally autonomous. Though inspired by the original Wall Street occupation, they have
all been created by the people in their own communities. No outside person or group has the
slightest control over any of these assemblies. Which is just as it should be. When the local assemblies see a practical need for
coordination, they will coordinate; in the mean time, the proliferation of autonomous groups and actions is safer and
more fruitful than the top-down “unity” for which bureaucrats are always appealing. Safer,
because it counteracts repression: if the occupation in one city is crushed (or coopted), the
movement will still be alive and well in a hundred others. More fruitful, because this diversity enables
people to share and compare among a wider range of tactics and ideas. Each assembly is working out its own
workers bypass their union bureaucracies and take collective action on their own, as they did in France.)
procedures. Some are operating by strict consensus, others by majority vote, others with various combinations of the two (e.g. a “modified consensus” policy of
requiring only 90% agreement). Some are remaining strictly within the law, others are engaging in various kinds of civil disobedience. They are establishing
diverse types of committees or “working groups” to deal with particular issues, and diverse methods of ensuring the accountability of delegates or spokespeople.
They are making diverse decisions as to how to deal with media, with police and with provocateurs, and adopting diverse ways of collaborating with other groups
or causes. Many
types of organization are possible; what is essential is that things remain
transparent, democratic and participatory, that any tendency toward hierarchy or manipulation
is immediately exposed and rejected. Another new feature of this movement is that, in contrast to previous radical movements that
tended to come together around a particular issue on a particular day and then disperse, the current occupations are settling in their
locations with no end date. They’re there for the long haul, with time to grow roots and experiment with all sorts of new possibilities. You
have to participate to understand what is really going on. Not everyone may be up for joining in
the overnight occupations, but practically anyone can take part in the general assemblies. At the
Occupy Together website you can find out about occupations (or planned occupations) in more
than a thousand cities in the United States as well as several hundred others around the world.
The occupations are bringing together all sorts of people coming from all sorts of different backgrounds. This can be a new and perhaps
unsettling experience for some people, but it’s amazing how quickly the barriers break down
when you’re working together on an exciting collective project. The consensus method may at first seem tedious,
especially if an assembly is using the “people’s mic” system (in which the assembly echoes each phrase of the speaker so that everybody can hear). But it has the
advantage of encouraging people to speak to the point, and after a little while you get into the rhythm and begin to appreciate the effect of everyone focusing on
each phrase together, and of everyone getting a chance to have their say and see their concerns get a respectful hearing from everyone else. In
this
process we are already getting a taste of a new kind of life, life as it could be if we weren’t stuck
in such an absurd and anachronistic social system. So much is happening so quickly that we hardly know how to express it.
Feelings like: “I can’t believe it! Finally! This is it! Or at least it could be it — what we’ve been waiting for for so
long, the sort of human awakening that we’ve dreamed of but didn’t know if it would ever
actually happen in our lifetime.” Now it’s here and I know I’m not the only one with tears of joy. A woman speaking at the first Occupy
Oakland general assembly said, “I came here today not just to change the world, but to change myself.” I think everyone there knew what she meant. In this
brave new world we’re all beginners. We’re all going to be making lots of mistakes. That is only
to be expected, and it’s okay. We’re new at this. But under these new conditions we’ll learn fast.
At that same assembly someone else had a sign that said: “There are more reasons to be excited
than to be scared.”
Leaderless revolutions amongst the working class are the only way to solve – vote
negative to liberate your imagination
Niman in 2011
(Michael I., Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies in the Communication Department at
Buffalo State College, “#OCCUPY Your Dreams”, http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-yourdreams/1318862245, MattG)
Liberate your imagination, understand your revolution. It’s like the nation just woke from a
decade-long coma. The last time we shared consciousness was in September 2001. The November 1999 “Battle in Seattle”
birthed a determined and seemingly unstoppable national movement for social, economic, and environmental justice. Over the next two
years, activists ranging from religious and union leaders to black bloc anarchists fanned out into a tapestry of communities, giving lively,
impromptu lessons on global trade and the assorted macroeconomic nuances of corporate domination. Where
a previous
generation’s activists worked the streets with simple slogans like “Stop the War,” the Seattle
generation tasked themselves with educating and angering the public about the complex
array of injustices brought on by corporatist, neo-liberal global trade pacts foisted on a dazed
world by shadowy organizations with acronyms like IMF and WTO—all the brainchildren of neoclassical economists who plotted their hegemonic schemes in innocent-sounding places like the University of Chicago. Political
activism had finally morphed from simple sloganeering into a radical university of the
streets. Complex as it was, people were understanding the web of connections between war,
Nike, unemployment, sweatshops, ecocide, Wal-Mart, debt, genocide, Wall Street, and our
recurring nightmares. And with this education came the knowledge to identify one’s enemies.
While we were hitting the pavement running with hopes and dreams, corporatists were also
active, plotting their upcoming consolidation of power, which culminated in George W. Bush’s controversial
ascendency to the White House in January 2001. The nation was heading for a full-blown showdown as that year progressed.
Increasingly boisterous demonstrations over the summer of 2001 built the movement that began in Seattle into a seemingly unstoppable
juggernaut, gaining momentum for what was to be an autumn of resistance later in the year. As September began, a consortium of major
news agencies was readying the release of a comprehensive, eight-month investigation documenting the theft of the previous year’s
presidential election, and undermining the corporatist hold on the White House. Things
were coming together. People
felt that perhaps it was safe to once again dream.
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Then came September 11, Fox News, and a decade of tweets and nightmares. We were
suddenly in a war that clearly would be endless. We didn’t quite know who this war was
against. Everyone was either with “us” or with the “terrorists” and “evildoers.” Police
started beating us in the streets whenever we dared to dream in public. Unlike the Battle of Seattle,
where courts took sadistic cops to task for their criminality, it was suddenly open season on America’s infidels.
New phrases and words forced their way into our lexicon: “Homeland Security,” “Free
Speech Zone,” “Indefinite Detention,” “Enhanced Interrogation,” “Preventative Detention,”
“Eco-terrorism,” “Economic Terrorism,” and “Pre-emptive War,” to name a few. There
would be no autumn of resistance. The years that followed are what we now often refer to as
the Lost Decade. Social and economic inequality regressed to levels not seen since the 1800s,
as corporatists, their media, and political lackeys worked to roll back the social gains of the
20th century. “Deregulation” has emerged as a mantra for corporate plunder. Environmental
destruction neared a tipping point as ersatz GreenTM products flooded the market, easing
our uncomfortable consciences as we medicated our unease with yet more consumerism,
growing both debt and market bubbles while consuming our planet to death. Meanwhile, our
intellectual discourse shrunk to the point of fitting inside a 140 character Tweet or incoherent
two-thumbed text (“2thum txt”). Four weeks ago this all changed when a few hundred
demonstrators converged on Wall Street with no formal organization, no leaders, and no end
date for their open-ended protest. As #OCCUPY WALL STREET began, the mass media did
its best to ignore this American incarnation of the Arab Spring. Day after day the alternative
media covered the protests, which had grown to be many times the size of pro-corporate “Tea
Party” events that typically enjoy the national media limelight. Brutal police attacks against
protesters caught on camera and posted to social media sites went viral in the blogosphere,
eventually forcing their way into TV newscasts. Over the course of the last month, while actions in New York
tripled in size each week, the movement went national, then international, with #OCCUPY events in more than
600 American cities, towns, campuses, and villages this week, spanning 45 states, with the largest demonstration to date drawing
And at every step in this viral
movement’s growth, it has reaffirmed its dedication to remaining acephalous (without
leaders) and nonhierarchical. Tweet this word: acephelous. Post it, paint it, text it, or scream it. Maybe even add it to your
Microsoft Office dictionary. It’s what makes this movement unstoppable. There are no leaders to coopt, harass, arrest, or kill. #OCCUPY leaders will never sell out their movement because they
don’t exist. They will never raise money for a hope-killing presidential candidate or call on
you to compromise your values just as you begin to feel empowered. And there is no
hierarchy that claims to speak for you, while silencing your voice. There is no one to stop this
movement once it gains momentum. Acephalous! It’s also important to note that, essentially,
no one started this movement. Sure, Vancouver-based Adbusters magazine planted a viral seed, naming the initial event,
approximately 20,000 people—all before the movement’s one-month birthday.
#OCCUPY WALL STREET, and setting a date for a vague (bring a tent and plan to stay) event to take place in a different country 3,000
miles away. Adbusters is as obscure as it is controversial. The magazine is hostile to labor unions and once published an anti-Semitic
screed. The
movement we’re seeing, however, took on a life of its own, essentially fueled not by
Adbusters’ original call to action but by Wall Street’s continuing greed. The largest actions to date were supported by
unions, and last week hundreds of religious Jews showed up in New York’s financial district on Yom Kipper, the Jewish day of
atonement, to hold their religious observance where atonement was most needed. While Adbusters deserves credit, perhaps, for lighting
the fuse, they are no longer a significant part of this story. This
is what democracy looks like: It’s acephalous.
The movement belongs to those who are on the streets moving it. Sure, acephalous means
#OCCUPY will suffer some rough and embarrassing moments, as there always are in an
inclusive movement, but in the end, it’s going to be effective in moving the ball, as similar
movements have been in Tunisia and Egypt. And yes, that’s another inspiration for this
winter of democracy. Unlikely as it would have seemed just a decade ago, America is
importing democracy from the Middle East. The biggest challenge now is to not let the
Democratic Party co-opt this movement like the corporatists have done with the Tea Party.
#OCCUPY isn’t being led by a charismatic figure or dogmatic political organization. It’s
being led by a shared passion—that the United States should be a small “d” democratic
nation governed by principles of social justice. This is the antithesis of what Wall Street and
the corporate power structure behind both major political parties represent. With a passion,
and a highly visible target, who needs leaders to sell you out? Even the Associated Press, the establishment
news stalwart that soldiered on for two weeks telling us there was no real message behind the movement, finally conceded that yes,
people do have a coherent message and a reason for taking to the streets. Last weekend, AP reporter Cristian Salazar identified that
message: “That ‘the
99 percent’ who struggle daily as the economy shudders, employment
stagnates and medical costs rise are suffering as the 1 percent who control the vast majority
of the economy’s wealth continues to prosper.” Even Forbes ran this story, bringing the message that Wall Street
insiders have been reading for weeks on street placards to their iPad screens. The revolution has been televised. The New
York group used the difficult but uncompromisingly inclusive process of group consensus to draft a list of grievances. (See the sidebar.)
Their demand is simple, and it’s directed not at government, per se, but at us, calling on us to
“assert [our] power” and ultimately change the system that perpetuates these injustices.
Their message: “Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a
process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.” It’s
up to us, everywhere, to take it from here.
Revolution Coming
The occupy movement opened up new avenues for us to analyze capitalism- now is
key
Cooke, a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action, ’12
(Shamus, 7/9, “Occupy the Economy: Review of Richard Wolff's Book”,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31843) CW
The target
audience of “Occupy the Economy” are those radicalized by the Occupy movement, and
there is both a generation gap plus an ideological chasm separating these readers from Wolff,
demanding some artistry to complement the economics. Wolff performs his task with surprising ease,
explaining complex, relevant ideas in a digestible manner that has the potential to guide its readers
into focused political action, or at least a higher understanding of the nation's most pressing economic
and political problems. The beginning of “Occupy the Economy” lays an excellent foundation. Wolff explains the larger
political/theoretical victories of the Occupy movement: "The importance of the Occupy movement
was and is positioning its challenge to capitalism front and center among its concerns and
passions...despite the power of pro-capitalism ideology, Occupy has been able to contest it in
amazingly profound ways in an amazingly short time and for an amazing number of Americans." Although Occupy is not
an explicitly anti-capitalist movement, many of its main slogans, chants, and actions have had an implicitly anti-capitalist
character to them, cutting to the heart of how the capitalist system operates, and for whom. Wolff argues that
because capitalism could not be a subject for discussion or debate until now, its " darker impulses"
were allowed to fester unnoticed, unchallenged, permeating our culture. Occupy has cut through
decades of this stifling thinking, opening up intellectual avenues that will now be pursued by millions
of people. For example, as Wolff explains, we can now have open discussions - thanks to Occupy - about how
our society produces and distributes goods and services (capitalism), and we can therefore learn how
the 1% benefits from this system most, how they control it undemocratically, and how we can work to
change it. Wolff, a Marxist economist, gives a deeper analysis of capitalism, so that the "mysteries" of wealth
accumulation become clear in all their exploitative nature. By reading “Occupy the Economy,” the reader will
unknowingly receive an excellent introductory lesson into Marx's greatest literary achievement, “Capital.” But Wolff does not shy away from
the origins of his analysis: "...if
you want to think critically about capitalism, sooner or later you are going to
have to encounter the theoretical tradition of Marxism, because it is the most developed and draws
from contributions made from virtually every country on Earth, from a thousand struggles against
business and governments supporting capitalism. It's a repository, a rich resource that ought to be
made use of by anyone who wants to have a balanced perspective when it comes to dealing with the
real problems." Wolff explains that, in the same way that the biased, pro-capitalist beliefs went unchallenged in
our society so did the slanted, anti-socialist ideas that dominated our universities and political system
without real discussion or debate. For example, the two most important socialist writers in the 20th century are undoubtedly
Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and they are intentionally ignored by over 95 percent of universities in the United States, ensuring that
students have no real understanding of modern socialism and its common distortions. But variations
of socialism continue to
inspire social movements around the world. The United States is by far the most anti-socialist nation
on earth, due to its unique Cold War era of McCarthyism that sparked a witch hunt that virtually
banished Marxism in academia, thus removing important contributions to our understanding of
political science, economics, history, art, and other disciplines.
A2 – Permutation
The permutation is a capitalist ploy of seeking to sanitize small corners of globalization
while concealing the violence of the system as a whole – there can be no compromise
Kovel 2002
(Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, p 142-3)
The value-term that subsumes everything into the spell of capital sets going a kind of wheel of
accumulation, from production to consumption and back, spinning ever more rapidly as the inertial mass of capital grows, and generating
its force field as a spinning magnet generates an electrical field. This phenomenon has important implications for the reformability of the
system. Because capital
is so spectral, and succeeds so well in ideologically mystifying its real nature,
attention is constantly deflected from the actual source of eco-destabilization to the instruments by
which that source acts. The real problem, however, is the whole mass of globally accumulated capital, along with the
speed of its circulation and the class structures sustaining this. That is what generates the force field, in proportion to its own
scale; and it is this force field, acting across the numberless points of insertion that constitute the ecosphere, that creates ever larger
agglomerations of capital, sets the ecological crisis going, and keeps it from being resolved. For one fact may be taken as certain — that to
resolve the ecological crisis as a whole, as against tidying
up one corner or another, is radically incompatible with the
existence of gigantic pools of capital, the force field these induce, the criminal underworld with which they connect, and, by
extension, the elites who comprise the transnational bourgeoisie. And by not resolving the crisis as a whole, we open
ourselves to the spectre of another mythical creature, the many-headed hydra, that regenerated itself the
more its individual tentacles were chopped away. To realize this is to recognize that there is no
compromising with capital, no schema of reformism that will clean up its act by making it act more greenly
or efficiently We shall explore the practical implications of this thesis in Part III, and here need simply to restate the conclusion in blunt
terms: green capital, or non-polluting capital, is preferable to the immediately ecodestructive breed on its immediate terms. But this is the
lesser point, and diminishes with its very success. For green capital (or ‘socially/ecologically responsible investing’) exists, by its very capitalnature, essentially to create more value, and this leaches away from the concretely green location to join the great pool, and follows its force
field into zones of greater concentration, expanded profitability — and greater ecodestruction.
A2 – Case Outweighs
Do not give in to the impulse to prioritize survival over meaningful social change.
Capitalism has historically exploited this compulsion in a way that authorizes the most
vicious and unspeakable violence imaginable. Ironically, it is just the urge to pursue
survival in the face of everything decent that puts all life on earth on the brink of
extinction.
Cook, Prof. of Phil. Univ. Windsor, 2006 [Deborah, “STAYING ALIVE: ADORNO AND HABERMAS ON SELF-PRESERVATION UNDER LATE
CAPITALISM,” Rethinking Marxism, 18(3):433-447]
In the passage in Negative Dialectics where he warns against self-preservation gone wild, Adorno states that it is “only as reflection upon … selfpreservation that reason would be above nature” (1973, 289). To rise above nature, then, reason must become “cognizant of its own natural essence”
(1998b, 138). To be more fully rational, we must reflect on what Horkheimer and Adorno once called our underground history (1972, 231). In other words,
we must recognize that our behavior is motivated and shaped by instincts, including the instinct for self-preservation (Adorno 1998a, 153). In his lectures on
Kant, Adorno makes similar remarks when he summarizes his solution to the problem of self-preservation gone wild. To remedy this problem, nature must
first become conscious of itself (Adorno 2000, 104). Adopting the Freudian goal of making the unconscious conscious, Adorno also insists that this
critical self-understanding be accompanied by radical social, political, and economic
changes that would bring to a halt the self-immolating domination of nature. This is why mindfulness
of nature is necessary but not sufficient to remedy unbridled self-preservation. In the final analysis, society must be fundamentally transformed in order
rationally to accommodate instincts that now run wild owing to our forgetfulness of nature in ourselves. By insisting on mindfulness of nature in the self,
the taming of selfpreservation is a normative task rather than an accomplished fact. Because selfpreservation remains irrational, we now encounter serious environmental problems like
those connected with global warming and the greenhouse effect, the depletion of natural
resources, and the death of more than one hundred regions in our oceans. Owing to selfpreservation gone wild, we have colonized and destabilized large parts of the world,
adversely affecting the lives of millions, when we have not simply enslaved or murdered
their inhabitants outright. Famine and disease are often the result of ravaging the land in
the name of survival imperatives. Wars are waged in the name of self-preservation: with
his now notoriously invisible weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein was said to
represent a serious threat to the lives of citizens in the West. The war against terrorism,
waged in the name of self-preservation, has seriously undermined human rights and civil
liberties; it has also been used to justify the murder, rape, and torture of thousands As it
now stands, the owners of the means of production ensure our survival through profits that,
at best, only trickle down to the poorest members of society. Taken in charge by the
capitalist economy, self-preservation now dictates that profits increase exponentially to the
detriment of social programs like welfare and health care. In addition, self- preservation
has gone wild because our instincts and needs are now firmly harnessed to commodified
offers of satisfaction that deflect and distort them. Having surrendered the task of selfpreservation to the economic and political systems, we remain in thrall to untamed survival
instincts that could well end up destroying not just the entire species, but all life on the
planet.
Adorno champions a form of rationality that would tame self-preservation, but in contrast to Habermas, he thinks that
A2 – Occupy Fails
It’s only the beginning - Occupy is adapting to crash capitalism and succeeding
Adbusters 6-5-12 (Adbusters is a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way
corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society, June 5, 2012, “Flash Encampments”
http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/flash-encampments.html)
Our movement is living through a painful rebirth… “There
has been a unfortunate consolidation of power in #OWS,”
translates into ideological dominance and recurring lines of thought. We
are facing a nauseating poverty of ideas.” Burned out, out of money, out of ideas… seduced by salaries, comfy
offices, book deals, old lefty cash and minor celebrity status, some of the most prominent early heroes of our leaderless
uprising are losing the edge that catalyzed last year’s one thousand encampments. Bit by bit, Occupy’s
first generation is succumbing to an insidious institutionalization and ossification that could be fatal to
our young spiritual insurrection unless we leap over it right now. Putting our movement back on track will take
nothing short of a revolution within Occupy. The new tone was set on Earth Day, April 22, in a suburb bordering Berkeley, California
when a dozen occupiers quietly marched a small crowd to a tract of endangered urban agricultural
land, cut through the locked fence and set up tents, kitchens and a people’s assembly. Acting autonomously under the
banner of Occupy, without waiting for approval from any preexisting General Assembly , Occupy The Farm was
notable for its sophisticated preplanning and careful execution — they even brought chickens — that offered a positive vision for
the future and engendered broad community support. While encampments across the world were unable to re-establish
writes one founding Zuccotti. “This
themselves on May Day, this small cadre of farm occupiers boldly maintained their inspiring occupation for nearly four weeks. In Minneapolis,
a core of occupiers have launched an Occupy Homes campaign that is unique for its edgy tenacity.
“What is unusual, in fact utterly unprecedented, is the level of aggression and defiance of the law by these activists,” a
spokesperson for Freddie Mac, a U.S. corporation that trades in mortgages, told a local paper. “Over the past week … the city has tossed out
protesters and boarded up the house, only to see the demonstrators peel back the boards and use chains, concrete-filled barrels and other
obstacles to make it more difficult to carry them away,” the article reports. Last Friday, police
were so desperate to prevent a
re-occupation of the foreclosed home that they surrounded the house with “30 Minneapolis police
officers with batons” and “over two dozen marked and undercover squad cars and a paddy wagon.”
Occupiers responded by laughing and signing songs… joyous in their struggle to elevate the home into an symbol of
democratic resistance to the banks. In its own sweet way, our movement is now moving beyond the Zuccotti
model and developing a tactical imperative of its own: Small groups of fired up second generation
occupiers acting independently, swiftly and tenaciously pulling off myriad visceral local actions,
disrupting capitalist business-as-usual across the globe. The next big bang to capture the world’s
imagination could come not from a thousand encampments but from a hundred thousand ephemeral jams… a global
cascade of flash encampments may well be what this hot Summer will look like. Meanwhile, tents are up once again in Tahrir Square and youth
from Quebec to Auckland to Moscow to Oakland are rising up against a future that does not compute. Stay loose, play jazz, keep the faith …
Capitalism is crashing and our movement has just begun.
A2 – Impact Turn
Hold their impact turns to a high degree of skepticism – Capitalism consistently
creates the conditions for crisis and displaces the cost of instability onto the majority
in order to protect the power of those at the top.
Richard D. Wolff, ’10 (Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, “Economic
Crisis and Tax Injustice,” Visiting Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New
School University in New York, New Departures in Marxian Theory (Routledge, 2006, Capitalism Hits the
Fan, Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do about It, Economic
Update, http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading/2010/10/30/capitalism-regressive-taxation, be)
communities across the
US have been raising their local property taxes. The AP surveyed 39 states and studied 2,387 revenue measures that came
The Associated Press's Robin Hindery reported on October 29, 2010 that the AP had found a remarkable fact:
before town, city, and county voters. In most of those elections, voters favored measures that raised their own property tax rates. Voters
wanted to support their local schools and other services provided by local governments. The AP began Hindery's story as follows: "Forget all the
talk about voters being fed up with high taxes." So much for the surface of the story; just below it lie some facts about yet another huge mass
High unemployment and falling home prices have combined to reduce the
tax revenues of all 50 states and likewise the local property tax revenues of most cities and towns.
The states have usually responded by cutting, among other outlays, their often substantial aid to cities
and towns (helping to pay for public schools and many other local government services). So everywhere local governments are suffering
doubly: reduced property tax revenues from local property owners and reduced state aid. This has forced thousands of local
communities to lay off thousands of workers . In September 2010 , for example, local governments
of victims of capitalism's current crisis.
across the US fired 76,000 workers, thereby offsetting the 64,000 additional workers hired by the
entire US private sector that month . Many more cities and towns drastically cut their provision of local services -- just when
people need more not less of them precisely because of the same crisis. Our citizens have become desperate to hold on to
at least minimum levels of the local government services they rely on every day. In response, local
governments have given their voters the option of raising their local property tax rates to pay for saving their services. And, as the AP reports,
in our economic system,
its deep crisis has led local people to raise their own taxes to slow the shrinking of their local
government services. Yet that is not the worst part of this story. Local property taxes in the US are among the
nation's most regressive taxes. That means they fall on people regardless of their ability to pay. Where the
most are choosing to do that: to tax themselves extra to offset the costs of the economic crisis. Put plainly,
federal government and most state governments have a more progressive tax system that requires upper-income earners to pay higher tax
rates than lower-income earners, local property taxes do not work that way. For example, all homeowners usually pay the same rate of
local property taxes in the US discriminate against
owners of tangible property (land, homes, stores, buildings, automobiles, etc.) by taxing those kinds of property
while NOT taxing intangible forms of property (stocks, bonds, etc.). In other words, while localities tax the tangible kinds of
property fairly widely distributed among our people, they do not tax the intangible kinds of property mostly owned by the richest citizens. The
result: the economic crisis is shifting an inequitable tax burden even more onto the shoulders of those
least able to afford it even as they struggle to cope with the direct effects of the crisis (unemployment,
property tax, likewise all commercial and industrial property-owners. Finally,
foreclosures, etc.). This is yet another way in which the costs of a capitalist crisis are shifted from those who caused it to those already
victimized by it. Hence the sad spectacle of people voting in local elections to reduce this disaster by further taxing themselves rather than
Capitalism proves itself to be a system whose workings not only generate
repeated and often severe economic crises. It also systematically shifts the costs of that instability
down the social scale to the majority in the middle and bottom.
changing a system that works like this.
A2 – Framework
Traditional policymaking framework gives capitalism a free pass – the debate must be
centered on the system. The kritik is offense against your framework.
Wolff, an American economist, well known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology, and class analysis, ’11 (Richard, 10/4, “Occupy
Wall Street ends capitalism's alibi”, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/04/occupy-wall-street-new-york) CW
We all know that moving in this direction will elicit the screams of "socialism" from the usual predictable corners. The tired rhetoric lives on long after the cold war
that orchestrated it fades out of memory. The audience for that rhetoric is fast fading, too. It
is long overdue in the US for us to have a
genuine conversation and struggle over our current economic system. Capitalism has gotten a free
pass for far too long. We take pride in questioning, challenging, criticising and debating our health,
education, military, transportation and other basic social institutions. We argue whether their current
structures and functioning serve our needs. We work our way to changing them so they perform
better. And so it should be. Yet, for decades now, we have failed to similarly question, challenge,
criticise and debate our economic system: capitalism. Because a taboo protected capitalism,
cheerleading and celebrating it became obligatory. Criticism and questions got banished as heresy,
disloyalty or worse. Behind the protective taboo, capitalism degenerated into the ineffective, unequal, crisis-ridden social disaster we all now bear.
Capitalism is the problem – and the joblessness, homelessness, insecurity, and austerity it now
imposes everywhere are the costs we bear. We have the people, the skills and the tools to produce
the goods and services needed for a just society to prosper. We just need to reorganise our producing
units differently, to go beyond a capitalist economic system that no longer serves our needs.
Humanity learned to do without kings and emperors and slave masters. We found our way to a
democratic alternative, however partial and unfinished the democratic project remains. We can now
take the next step to realise that democratic project. We can bring democracy to our enterprises – by
transforming them into cooperatives owned, operated and governed by democratic assemblies
composed of all who work in them and all the residents of the communities who are interdependent
with them. Let me conclude by offering a slogan: " The US can do better than corporate capitalism ." Let that be an
idea and a debate that this renewed movement can engage. Doing so would give an immense gift to
the US and the world. It would break through the taboo, finally subjecting capitalism to the critiques
and debates it has evaded for far too long – and at far too great a cost to all of us.
A2 – Sustainable
Capitalism is unsustainable – crises are accelerating substantially
William E. Halal, 2011 (PhD, professor at George Washington University, Washington, DC, and
president of TechCast LLC, “Technology’s Promise: Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business
and Society,” http://www.wfs.org/content/continuing-crisis-capitalism-how-bad-will-it-get, be)
Leaders from Bill Gates to the Pope are worried about the “Crisis of Capitalism,” yet defenders of the American system that almost brought
Recent threats to shut down the Federal government rather than pass
any form of tax increase, for instance, have the effect of taking money from the poor to protect the
rich, who already own the bulk of the nation’s wealth. This “revolt of the rich against the poor” highlights how extremely
conservative our free market ideology has become – ironically, at a time when markets are failing. The US is entering its third
market crash in a decade, leaving many to wonder, how bad will it get? The nation has long struggled with a
tension between the values of free markets, limited government, and self-reliance that comprise Republican
ideals versus the need for community, cooperation, and social welfare that inspire Democrats. While this was manageable when
the country was growing, it has erupted into warfare now that the economy is stalled. To put the
statistics on income distribution in perspective, the gap between rich and poor is among the biggest in the world,
down the world economy are digging in.
and it is eerily reminiscent of the gap that preceded the Great Crash of 1929. Today’s Great Recession drags on largely because the public has
little to spend, causing stagnant market demand. Apart from the moral problem this poses for a largely Christian nation that professes to be
Democratic, it now threatens survival of the system. We used to justify this on the grounds that Capitalism was more productive, but the sorry
state of our healthcare, research, infrastructure, public schools, crime, and other indicators no longer supports that claim. What’s worse, the
dot.com bust of 2001, the banking crisis of 2008, and now the crash of 2011 – three crashes in a decade – tell us something is seriously wrong.
Liberals are complicit in creating this mess, of course. The Democrats are also dug in, protecting social benefits and a
massive Federal
bureaucracy that no longer make sense in a changing world. President Bill Clinton had it right a decade ago: “The era of
big government is over.” VP Al Gore was making progress “reinventing government” but lost the presidential election to George Bush. The rest
is history. Today’s crisis is a moment of truth.
The old American Dream of rugged individualism and lavish lifestyles no longer
works in a globalizing economy facing climate change, ecological overload, peak oil, financial
instability, and other mounting threats. The last thing the world needs now is more self-interest and lavish consumption, nor
does it need more government bureaucracy. Yet Americans are locked in destructive conflict between left and right to avoid sacrificing these
sacred cows. This fight is not only contentious, it is so bitter that all
energies are focused on beating the other party
rather than finding solutions. The differences are not really great because compromises are entirely possible. But a ferocious grip
on outmoded beliefs drives conflict in a knowledge-based world that requires collaborative problem solving. More daunting still is
the fear that even tax reform, revising Social Security and Medicare, and other heroic goals – if they
could be achieved – may not be enough to revive the Nation. As a management professor who has studied
organizations during a long career, it is painfully clear that our present forms of big business and big government are
badly outdated for a complex new world. President Obama should convene a conference inviting corporate CEOs,
government officials, labor leaders, and ordinary citizens to engage in a national strategic planning process. It should also be carried online with
wide participation to fully address these challenges, plan for a more difficult future, and redefine the American Dream. For starters, Obama
should appoint Al Gore as “Czar of Reinventing Government” and GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt, as “Czar of Reinventing Business.” Absent some such
breakthrough, we
can only look forward to more economic gridlock and political stalemate as the crisis
mounts. Will all this intransigence cause business failures and unemployment to reach levels of the Great Depression? Could the left and
center mobilize a counter-revolt to challenge the rich? Is it possible that the country could embrace opportunities to unify left and right into a
more creative American synthesis? Or will
we simply accept decline and learn to live with less?
Economic growth rates are progressively declining in speed
Robert W. McChesney and John Bellamy Foster, 2010 (Professor of Communications at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Political Economy of Media (Monthly Review Press), The Death and Life of American
Journalism, editor of Monthly Review, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, The Ecological Revolution (Monthly
Review Press) “Capitalism, the Absurd System: A View from the United States”, be)
Perhaps nothing points so clearly to the alienated nature of politics in the present day United States as the fact that capitalism, the economic
system that drives the society, is effectively off-limits to critical review or discussion. To the extent that capitalism is mentioned by politicians or
pundits, it is regarded in hushed tones of reverence for the genius of the market, its unquestioned efficiency, and its providential authority.
One might quibble with a corrupt and greedy CEO or a regrettable loss of jobs, but the superiority and necessity of capitalism—or, more
likely, its euphemism, the so-called “free market system”—is simply beyond debate or even consideration. There are, of course, those who
believe that the system needs more regulation and that there is room for all sorts of fine-tuning.
Nevertheless, there is no questioning of the basics. This prohibition on critically assessing capitalism begins in the
economics departments and business schools of our universities where, with but a few exceptions, it is easier to find an advocate of the
immediate colonization of Mars than it is to find a scholar engaged in genuine radical criticism of capitalism. This critical dearth extends to our
news media, which have a documented track record of promoting the profit system, and a keen distaste for those that advocate radical change.
It reaches all of us in one form or another. Anyone who wishes to participate in civic life quickly grasps that being tagged as anti-free market (or
socialist) is a near-certain way to guarantee one’s status as a political outcast. To criticize the system is to criticize the nation and “democracy.”
Such ideological dominance is worth more than a standing army of
a million troops to those wishing to maintain their positions of power and privilege. But the
illegitimacy of addressing the nature and logic of capitalism handcuffs almost everyone else. As long as
serious treatment of capitalism, the dominant social system, remains off-limits, social science itself is deeply compromised. The failure of
a society so marked in myriad ways by capitalism to confront this central reality can only be seen as a
great evasion. It is the refusal to engage in meaningful self-criticism, to seek self-knowledge. Americans are like the
proverbial fish unaware of the water that surrounds and permeates their existence. The question we should
This is a dream world for those atop the system.
ask is: What is society actually like when the veil of money is removed, and the real face of power is seen? Is society, stripped of its ideological
cover and reduced to nakedness, one of equality—where four hundred individuals in the United States (the Forbes 400) own almost as much
wealth as the bottom half of the population (150 million people)? Is this a rational society, when a trillion dollars each year is spent on the U.S.
military? Can it be justified when the system, according to modern science, is pointing to mass extinction of the species, quite possibly
humanity itself? Capitalism’s main
economic claim to being an indispensable system is that it promotes
economic growth, the benefits of which ostensibly trickle down to the vast majority. Today, however, in
the mature capitalist economies, economic growth has slowed to a crawl (though sufficient to threaten the environment). The
gains of labor productivity flow upwards by myriad pumps, after which they are seldom allowed to trickle down. The result is a deeply
unequal society and generalized economic stagnation, associated with a dearth of effective demand—
countered only in part by financial bubbles, which eventually burst with disastrous effects. In the past five
decades, the U.S. economy has grown, but at slower and slower rates. The stagnation of the last ten years resembles nothing so much as the
stagnation of the 1930s (i.e., the Great Depression years). The same is true to varying extents for all the other rich, mature, capitalist
economies.
A2 – Inevitable
The argument that we cannot overcome capitalism saps the critical energy from
revolution – the system is only strong because we think it is
Zizek in 1995 Slavoj, Ideology Between Fiction and Fantasy, Cardozo Law Review, page lexis
The problematic of "multiculturalism" that imposes itself today is therefore the form of appearance of
its opposite, of the massive presence of Capitalism as universal world system: it bears witness to the
unprecedented homogenization of today's world. It is effectively as if, since the horizon of social
imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an eventual demise of Capitalism - since, as
we might put it, everybody seems to accept that Capitalism is here to stay - the critical energy found a
substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the
capitalist world-system intact. So we are fighting our PC battles for the right of ethnic minorities, of
gays and lesbians, of different "life-styles," etc., while Capitalism pursues its triumphant march - and
today's critical theory, in the guise of "cultural studies," is doing the ultimate service to the
unrestrained development of Capitalism by actively contributing in the ideological effort to render its
massive presence invisible: in a typical postmodern "cultural critique," the very mention of Capitalism
as world system tends to give rise to the accusation of "essentialism," "fundamentalism," etc.
Aff Answers
Perm
Perm solves – disengagment from politics destroys activism against capital –
hypothesizing about policy making is key to creating space for the critique
David E. McClean, 2001, “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,” Am. Phil. Conf.,
www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm
Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics
continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including
Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest
policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence
and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be
relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step
program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These
elaborate theoretical
remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions
about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be
protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such
statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from
poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When
one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been
'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy
of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile
attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a
Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from
practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of
Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an
apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and
its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which
left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members
fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for
achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the
knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as
beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may
also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they
bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of
determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of
Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with
reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with
the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos,
one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests
and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism.
We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual
who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that
are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a
citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or
"How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one
The new public philosopher might seek to understand
labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of
international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics
of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going
down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where
intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take
difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means
making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual
world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped
member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?"
down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack
awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a
good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their
snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."
To reject capitalism, we must endorse a political project to transform the structures of
capitalism.
Wise 2009 (Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies & Prof of Development Studies;
Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico) 9
(Raúl Delgado, Forced Migration and US Imperialism: The Dialectic of Migration and Development, Crit
Sociol, 35: 767, ProQuest)
The promotion of development as social transformation could curtail forced migration. Globalization
depicts migration as inevitable; we must endorse, both in theory and practice, the viability of
alternative processes of development and do so on different levels. We must first redefine the
asymmetrical terms that developed countries, aided by principles that have by now turned into
fetishes (e.g. democracy, liberty, and free trade), used for imperialist domination. This involves
an exposé of imperialist practices, which have created oceans of inequality and condemned
vast regions of the world to marginalization, poverty, social exclusion, and unfettered
migration. Foreign investment (FI) has been a fundamental driving force in this regard. A genuine
process of social transformation involving the migrant and non-migrant sectors of society would not only
seek to contain the overwhelming flow of forced migration but also revert the ongoing processes of social
degradation that characterize underdevelopment and even pose a threat to human existence (Bello, 2006;
Harvey, 2007). As an alternative to the current phase of imperialist domination, Petras argues in favor of
what he defines as a Worker-Engineer Public Control model (WEPC) based on six main
principles: tax revenues versus tax evasions; profit remittances and privileged salaries versus social
investment; high reinvestment ratios versus capital flight; long term investment in research and
development versus speculative investment; social welfare versus capitalist privileges; and fixed
capital/mobile labor versus mobile capital/fixed labor (Petras, 2007: 234–5). This model provides an
alternative approach that maximizes national and working-class interests: ‘it has potential
drawbacks and internal contradictions, which require constant reflection, deliberation, debate and
reforms’ (2007: 237). Nonetheless, ‘the model provides the surest and most direct road to development
with democracy, social justice and national independence. The success of the WEPC model, its
introduction and sustainability, does not depend merely on its socioeconomic viability but also on
appropriate and supporting national security and cultural policies and institutions (2007: 237–8).
Following the above considerations, an approach based on a Marxist critique of the World Bank’s
views regarding the migration-development nexus, would posit that international migration is an
element of the current imperialist project led by the USA and that the migration phenomenon
has to be examined in this context in order to reveal its root causes and effects. In order to
approach migration’s cause-and-effect relationships with development and examine specific moments in
the dialectic interaction between development and migration, the following two issues must be
addressed:3 1. Strategic practices. These refer to the confrontation between different projects that
espouse diverging class interests, which in turn underlie the structures of contemporary
capitalism and its inherent development problems. There are currently two major projects. The
hegemonic one is promoted by the large MNCs, the governments of developed countries led by US
imperialism, and allied elites in underdeveloped nations, all under the umbrella of international
organizations commanded by the US government, like the IMF and the World Bank. The project’s loss of
legitimacy under the aegis of neoliberal globalization means that, nowadays, rather than writing of
hegemony we can use the term ‘domination’. The implementation of this imperialist project is not the
result of consensus but rather military force and the financial imposition of macroeconomic ‘structural
reform’ along the lines of the Washington or Post-Washington Consensus. The second alternative project
consists of the sociopolitical actions of a range of social classes and movements as well as
collective subjects and agents, including migrant associations that endorse a political project
designed to transform the structural dynamics and political and institutional
environments which bar the implementation of alternative development strategies on the
global, regional, national and local levels.
Alternative Fails
Lack of an endgame guarantees Occupy Theory fails
Anil 2011
(Haldun, Staff Writer @ MIT newspaper, “Opinion: Why the Occupy movement failed”
http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N59/anil.html) MattG
Of course, there are other incidents that have slowly begun corrupting the Occupy movement by
trivializing it. A perfect example is Occupy Harvard. One study in U.S. News and World Report looked at
the Fortune 100 companies and found where their CEOs attended college. Harvard University tops the
list with fifteen alumni as CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, trumping the runner up Columbia University
by more than two times. I’m no expert, but seeing Harvard students complain about social and income
inequalities not only expands the boundaries of hypocrisy, but also asserts itself as borderline
ridiculous. After all, they can easily become part of the “one percent” and have more opportunities than
they could ever know what do with. These reasons may have contributed to the Occupy movement’s
downfall, but they are by no means the most significant. One reason stands above all else in
determining the movement’s ineffectiveness, failure to prompt action and eventual collapse: the lack
of an endgame. Unlike other movements — like the Tea Party — the Occupy movement lacks clear
goals and demands without which it cannot expect change. Imagine yourself working on a group
project and one of your coworkers is constantly complaining. If he doesn’t offer a solution to all of these
problems that he deems obstructive, people around him will eventually tire of his constant ranting and
stop paying him any attention. This is exactly what the Occupy movement has brought on itself; by
constantly complaining but never offering any sort of tangible solution, they have turned themselves
from the “voice of the 99 percent” to “that annoying voice that just doesn’t quiet down.” Besides
making us talk about them, they have achieved nothing. Nothing has changed, the banks are still
making unbelievable sums of money, politics remain a game of power and influence and the one
percent continues to have all the wealth.
Occupy fails due to lack of specific planning and causes anarchy
Daley 2011
(Shannon, writer for the Telegraph, “The Occupy movement has failed the essential test of protest”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8901300/The-Occupy-movement-has-failed-the-essential-test-ofprotest.html) MattG
The abolition of racial segregation in the Southern states of America (and de facto segregation in its
Northern ones), the right of black US citizens to register as voters, and opposition to American military
action in Vietnam still seem to me to be issues on which it was necessary and right to take a stand. The
reason that I find it impossible to feel any kinship with the erstwhile campers of Zuccotti Park – let alone
their imitators in London – is not because I repent of my own youth, or no longer accept the value of
public protest. There is all the difference in the world between what we did then and what is going on
now. The single most important disparity, as my list of the causes I supported might indicate, is that
we knew quite definitively what it was that we were demanding. That is, we had a clear conception of
what it would mean to win: to have achieved our goal. The Civil Rights movement succeeded – after a
campaign of extraordinary courage and perseverance – first in de-segregating the schools in Alabama,
and then in getting Congress to pass an Act that made racial discrimination illegal. So those
campaigners who went down to Mississippi to register black voters knew that they had not risked
their lives for nothing. The young men who burned their draft cards (a federal offence) and then fled
the country were aware that they were sacrificing their American futures – but they also knew
precisely what would constitute a victory for their side of the argument. What exactly is it that would
count as a successful outcome for today’s protesters? They attack capitalism and want to replace it
with – what? According to a press release from the New York branch, they wish to: “Resist authority.
Rebuild the economy. Reclaim our democracy.” Really? Resist all authority? That would effectively
put an end to any form of ordered society that could protect the weak and ensure justice.
Cap Good – Environment
Privatization is already acting to resolve environmental crises
Littau ’09 (Stephan Littau, December 14th, 2009 , Researcher on Liberty and Freedom, Free Market
Capitalism: Good for the Environment?, http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2009/12/14/free-marketcapitalism-good-for-the-environment/)
Anyone who is really paying attention to the global warming debate will notice that reducing carbon
emissions and wealth distribution go hand-in-hand.¶ Or do they?¶ Dick Morris and Eileen McGann wrote
a very interesting article which makes very much the opposite point.
All this without government regulation, taxation, or phony “carbon credits”.¶ In all honesty, I really
don’t know what to make of the science behind the man made global warming debate* but I have
been a skeptic since the issue has been part of the public debate (and long before the whole
ClimateGate scandal broke). I don’t doubt the phenomenon of global warming at all; the earth has
warmed and cooled many times over billions of years without the intervention of man. Why wouldn’t
the earth warm up again regardless of man’s intervention?¶ My skepticism aside, the fact that carbon
emissions are being reduced on the part of private actors without government force isn’t all that
surprising. Over the last several years, global warming “awareness” has been broadcast on an almost
daily basis and the market has responded.¶ As a general rule, I believe that reducing waste and
increasing efficiency is not only good for the environment but also cost effective. Being environmentally
conscious should not mean sacrificing quality or increasing costs.¶ A good Capitalist wants to have the
car with the best mpg rating without sacrificing safety. It’s not because the Capitalist is necessarily
concerned about man made global warming nor that s/he wants to “stick it to the BIG oil companies”
but simply s/he wants more bang for his/her buck (greedy Capitalist!).¶ On a personal level, I use the
reusable shopping bags not because I am overly concerned about too many plastic bags filling up the
public landfill but simply because the reusable bags are stronger. I am quite willing to pay the $2 it
costs to buy the stronger, reusable bag because it means fewer trips between my vehicle and my
home without fear of the bag tearing in the process.¶ Many of these “green” innovations have
benefits beyond combating pollution.¶ But even if everything Morris and McGann writes is true and
even if the Kyoto targets are met (or even exceeded), this will not be enough for the global warming
extremists**. If carbon emissions are reduced by 17%, they will move the goal posts and demand 20 and
25% reductions. When these goals are not met, the extremists will demand more government regulation
despite what the free market has achieved on its own.¶ *I’m not a climatologist and neither are most
people who will read this post.¶ **As they also point out.
Capitalism is key to the environment
Boston Globe, 95
Thomas C Palmer Jr, staff writer. “Capitalism called key to saving environment” LexisNexis
What many activists perceive as the enemy of the environment - capitalism
- is in fact the only form of
government that can sustain it, political scientist James Q. Wilson said. "Capitalism is the
necessary, but not sufficient, condition for environmental protection," Wilson said Friday night, accepting an
award at the Gordon Public Policy Center at Brandeis University. "It is necessary because history has shown
neither communism nor any other form of organized society can better protect air, water,
land and life, he said. But it is insufficient because "it's hard to own a gray whale" or a scenic view, Wilson said. In the absence
of ownership and the protective actions that go with it, "collective actions," or laws and regulations to protect elements of the
environment, are necessary, he said. For 25 years a teacher at Harvard University and the author of "The Moral Sense," "Thinking About
Crime" and many other books, Wilson decamped to his home state of California in 1990 and teaches at the University of California at
Los Angeles. He joked that in this century several nations - like Korea, Vietnam and Germany - have "volunteered" to be cut in half,
thus offering an experiment in which some forms of government perform better with respect to issues like the environment. Early
environmentalists such as Barry Commoner and Rachel Carson blamed capitalism for environmental degradation, he said. "Then the
Iron Curtain came down. We discovered a vast toxic waste dump." Capitalism works to
protect the environment over the long run because it is a necessary condition for democracy,
which allows individuals to act politically against those who would harm air or water quality,
he said. Capitalism also brings relative prosperity, he said, allowing people to afford things
other than basic necessities. "High-yield agriculture has led to one of the greatest
reforestations in the history of man," Wilson said, referring to New England. Also, "it is
easier to regulate a private firm than a government agency," he said, noting that Southern California Edison
is always ahead of its publicly owned counterpart, Southern California Water and Power, in adopting new technologies. He attacked the
press for scaring the public needlessly and for discouraging "policy entrepreneurs" who experiment with new solutions. Partly as a result
of these exaggerations, Wilson said, "We cannot even carry on a debate . . . without grabbing each other's lapels, whitening our
knuckles, and shouting in each other's faces."
Cap is key to the environment – mindset shifting toward environmental ethics
Deavenport, CEO of Eastman Chemical Company, 98
Earnie. "Economic Growth Can Protect Global Resources." Opposing Viewpoints: Global Resources. Ed. Charles P. Cozic. San
Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center.
Simply put, the key to sustainable development is cost-effective risk management, and that is what I
want to talk about today. But first, let me explain the principle of cost-effective risk management. The role of risk and how to manage
risk are the focal points in the current struggle to reform and remake the environmental regulatory framework in the United States. The
U.S. chemical industry championed the use of risk management and its key elements of risk
assessment, risk prioritization, cost-benefit analysis, and peer review of scientific data as a
way of improving the U.S. environment and increasing its standard of living through a strong economy. We view
the principle of risk management as a common sense process for allocating scarce financial,
human, and natural resources to activities that can provide the most benefit at the least cost
to society. We are also firm in our belief that we have a moral obligation to future
generations to protect and use our limited resources wisely. Without such an obligation, the
goal of sustainable development cannot be achieved. Although we today cannot define the needs of tomorrow's
generations, we can work together to make certain that future generations are not limited in their choices when it comes their time to
forge their own destiny. Choices leading to a healthy environment and social equity will be theirs for the making if our generation will
commit to the principle of cost-effective risk management and obligate itself to a strong world economy. A Change in Attitude And we
are making great progress. For
more than 25 years now, industries worldwide have been going
through a generational change in attitude toward the environment. Environmental ethics are
now an integral part of our business strategies, and we have developed cleaner, energyefficient processes that manufacture products that are healthier, safer, and more
environmentally responsible. In the U.S., we have now reached the point with this shift in
attitude that leading-edge environmental technology no longer resides with government, but
resides now with the business community. Out of this change is emerging a new and modem environmental model.
This new model is replacing the old U.S. "command and control" model because society is recognizing that industry, with its advanced
technologies, can provide a cleaner environment at a lower cost than government can provide. Unlike the command and control model,
this new model is based on the fact that, when individual consumers are provided with
truthful and accurate information in an open and free marketplace, they will make an
educated and moral choice that will simultaneously lead to economic prosperity,
environmental improvement, and social equity. This emerging model is also based on the principles of
risk management that, when applied in a free market, lead to economic efficiencies, which in
turn lead to an improved environment and an ever increasing standard of living. Studies
show that as a nation becomes more economically efficient through industrial specialization
and open trade, per capita income increases. And as personal income
increases, environmental quality and social well-being improve. According to the World Bank, an annual
per capita income of $5,000 is the threshold at which a society will choose to make environmental improvements, and usually does.
Cap helps the environment – the market creates systems to lower pollution.
Payne 95
Rodger A. Payne. (Assistant professor of political science at the University of Louisville. He is director of the Grawemeyer Award in Ideas
Improving World Order and a past recipient of a Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in International Peace
and Security.) “Freedom and the Environment”. National Endowment for Democracy and the Johns Hopkins University
Press. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v006/6.3payne.html#authbio.
5) Open markets. All democracies have had market-based economic systems; it therefore seems reasonable to consider any
potential [End Page 48] advantages of markets when assessing the "green" characteristics of democracies. Such consideration seems
particularly apposite when one recalls that many of the ardent environmentalist critics of democracy named earlier have cited its
emphasis on private property and open markets as a grave shortcoming. In fact, however ,
capitalism is not the cause of
environmental degradation. After all, nonmarket economies have exploited the environment
quite ruthlessly, and mounting evidence indicates that some businesses in open economies are
finding strong incentives to protect the environment. Additionally, democratic governments are
increasingly utilizing market incentives to address ecological problems. The key question is how to
account for the diffused environmental costs ("externalities") of economic activity. To begin with, green consumerism can reshape
corporate conduct by offering incentives for environmentally sound business practices. An
increasing number of
consumers are "voting with their pocketbooks" and thereby successfully urging business to
take responsibility for reducing waste and pollution. For example, McDonald's, responding in part
to schoolchildren mailing styrofoam sandwich containers to its executives, revamped its product packaging and
modified its "waste stream" in conjunction with recommendations offered by an
environmental organization. Germany and other states have developed standardized labeling symbols so that consumers
can identify and purchase products that are less harmful to the environment. Nonetheless, the future influence of green consumerism is at
best unknown, and could be limited by a variety of informational complexities. 15 Much more importantly, the
marketing of
environmental goods and services is becoming a major industry, and some enterprises are
seeing the economic advantages of reducing waste and increasing operational efficiency.
Corporations can profit from selling preventive and cleanup technologies and information to
other businesses. This is already a large and growing source of world trade. For instance, while West European nations, Japan,
and the United States together traded about $20 billion worth of pollution-control devices in 1990, just two years later Germany alone
was trading more than that amount. Domestic environmental transactions offer an even larger market. The Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD)
calculates that its member states individually spend between
0.8 and 1.5 percent of GDP on public and private pollution abatement and control. The overall
total approached $250 billion in 1992, and could shoot up by half again by 1997.
Cap Good – Ethics
The free market is the most ethical system – allows individuals to act morally
Ditmar 09
Bob. "Capitalism Promotes Freedom and Opportunity." Opposing Viewpoints: American Values. Ed. David M. Haugen. Detroit:Greenhaven
Press, 2009. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center
From an ethical standpoint, I believe the free market system is the most logical system based
upon the belief that there are universal moral truths and principles. In many ways, capitalism is based
upon many of our Christian values of creation, the Golden Rule, and many of God's commandments. Acting in accordance with our
Christian beliefs, the free market system allows for creation of wealth by enhancing and improving what God has given us through
strong work ethics. Capitalism
as a system gives more food, medical and monetary aid to poor
nations than do other economic systems. This is in accordance with the principle of those that are blessed by God
with wealth should not keep all for themselves, but strive to help those that are poor by always trying to give aid and help to bring those
that are poor up to the standards of the wealthier. It is attempting to bring about economic justice to all. Everyone has a "right" as
endowed by our Creator, to life, liberty, freedom of thought and deed, and the pursuit of happiness.
Only capitalism recognizes that these principles are endowed by God and strives to give all mankind the access to
live up to these God-given principles. Capitalism does not attempt to "play God," by telling people what
to think, do, or act on, but instead attempts to give all a sense of awareness, social
responsibility and develop individual's conscience to strive for doing good. Capitalism wants
everyone to succeed by virtue of God-given talents and hard work. Ethically, this means capitalism, more than any other, attempts to
follow the Golden Rule of "doing unto others as you would want to have done to you."
Cap Good – Human Rights
Capitalism is key to human rights.
Weede, 07 (Erich, professor of sociology at the University of Bonn, Germany. Jan 31st, Cato Journal:
Human Rights, Limited Government, and Capitalism, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj28n1/cj28n1-3.pdf)
The global expansion of capitalism to developing countries has rescued hundreds of millions of
people from dire poverty, especially in Asia, and also has helped increase respect for human rights. Crossnational studies support the propositions that globalization—that is, trade openness or foreign direct investment—
promotes human rights in less developed countries, including free association and collective
bargaining rights, women’s economic rights, and the avoidance of child labor as well as of forced
labor (Apodaca 2001; Harrelson-Stephens and Callaway 2001; Neumayer and de Soysa 2005, 2006, 2007; Richards, Gelleny, and Sacko
2001). Since human rights also promote trade (Blanton and Blanton 2007), there seems to be a virtuous circle in which some human
rights— negative or physical integrity rights in contrast to welfare rights—and international trade reinforce each other.
There is no perfect market or perfect government, but evidence shows that improving market institutions contribute
to improving people’s economic and personal freedoms. Political reform is still necessary in China and other
authoritarian regimes if human rights are to be protected and enhanced. Retreating from globalization and market-liberal
principles, however, would be a step backwards. According to econometric studies, globalization does
not undermine human rights but serves to spread them beyond the Western world.
And, human rights preserve value to life
Penn et. al 2010 (Michael L. Penn, Professor of Pyschology at Franklin & Marshall College, Aditi
Malik, International relations and human rights advocate "The Protectionism and Development of the
Human Spirit: An Expanded Focus for Human Rights Discourse", \\wyo-js, Human Rights Quarterly,
Volume 32, Number 3, August 2010, pg. 665-688)
human capacity to know, love, and will creates needs. The human capacity to know, for
implicates a need for education. Unless this need is satisfied the capacity to know will not
develop properly. Similarly, the capacity to love creates the need to belong. Without the satisfaction of
this need, the capacity to love is still born or distorted; the capacity to will creates the need for a
certain measure of freedom. Without the proper exercise of freedom, the inner capacity for
autonomy cannot unfold. In the satisfaction of legitimate needs we protect the human spirit. It is for
this reason that human needs constitute the logical and pragmatic bases of all human rights claims.
In a similar manner the
example,
Human rights preserve people’s health, economic, social, and political well-being as
well as prevent genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity
Maiese 04 (Michelle, research staff at Conflict Research Consortium, June 2004,“Human Rights
Protection” http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/human_rights_protect/)
To protect human rights is to ensure that people receive some degree of decent, humane treatment.
Because political systems that protect human rights are thought to reduce the threat of world conflict,
all nations have a stake in promoting worldwide respect for human rights.[8] International human rights law, humanitarian
intervention law and refugee law all protect the right to life and physical integrity and attempt to limit the unrestrained power of the state. These
laws aim to preserve
humanity and protect against anything that challenges people's health, economic
well-being, social stability and political peace. Underlying such laws is the principle of nondiscrimination, the notion that
rights apply universally.[9] Responsibility to protect human rights resides first and foremost with the states themselves. However, in many cases
public authorities and government officials institute policies that violate basic human rights. Such
abuses of power by political leaders and state authorities have devastating effects, including
genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Cap Good – Poverty
Capitalism helps the poor and sick. The aff creates a better economy, allowing people
to improve their lives.
Gates 8
(Bill gates, inventor of Microsoft, writing for times magazine. 7/31/08 "Making Capitalism More
Creative" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1828417,00.html)
It might seem strange to talk about creative capitalism when we're paying more than $4 for a gallon
of gas and people are having trouble paying their mortgages. There's no doubt that today's economic
troubles are real; people feel them deeply, and they deserve immediate attention. Creative capitalism
isn't an answer to the relatively short-term ups and downs of the economic cycle. It's a response to the longerterm fact that too many people are missing out on a historic, century-long improvement in the quality of life.
In many nations, life expectancy has grown dramatically in the past 100 years. More people
vote in elections, express their views and enjoy economic freedom than ever before. Even with
all the problems we face today, we are at a high point of human well-being. The world is
getting a lot better. The problem is, it's not getting better fast enough, and it's not getting better
for everyone. One billion people live on less than a dollar a day. They don't have enough nutritious food,
clean water or electricity. The amazing innovations that have made many lives so much better — like vaccines
and microchips — have largely passed them by. This is where governments and nonprofits come in.
As I see it, there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest and caring for others. Capitalism
harnesses self-interest in a helpful and sustainable way but only on behalf of those who can
pay. Government aid and philanthropy channel our caring for those who can't pay. And the
world will make lasting progress on the big inequities that remain — problems like AIDS, poverty and
education — only if governments and nonprofits do their part by giving more aid and more
effective aid. But the improvements will happen faster and last longer if we can channel
market forces, including innovation that's tailored to the needs of the poorest, to complement what
governments and nonprofits do. We need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way
than we do today.
Cap solves poverty and increases V2L
Crook 2005 (C, Writer for The Economist, January 20, hamk.fi, A.N.)
It would be a challenge to find a recent annual report of any big international company that justifies
the firm's existence merely in terms of profit, rather than “service to the community”. Such reports
often talk proudly of efforts to improve society and safeguard the environment—by restricting
emissions of greenhouse gases from the staff kitchen, say, or recycling office stationery—before turning
hesitantly to less important matters, such as profits. Big firms nowadays are called upon to be good
corporate citizens, and they all want to show that they are. On the face of it, this marks a significant
victory in the battle of ideas. The winners are the charities, non-government organisations and other
elements of what is called civil society that pushed for CSR in the first place. These well-intentioned
groups certainly did not invent the idea of good corporate citizenship, which goes back a long way. But
they dressed the notion in its new CSR garb and moved it much higher up the corporate agenda. In
public-relations terms, their victory is total. In fact, their opponents never turned up. Unopposed, the
CSR movement has distilled a widespread suspicion of capitalism into a set of demands for action. As its
champions would say, they have held companies to account, by embarrassing the ones that especially
offend against the principles of CSR, and by mobilising public sentiment and an almost universally
sympathetic press against them. Intellectually, at least, the corporate world has surrendered and gone
over to the other side. The signs of the victory are not just in the speeches of top executives or the
diligent reporting of CSR efforts in their published accounts. Corporate social responsibility is now an
industry in its own right, and a flourishing profession as well. Consultancies have sprung up to advise
companies on how to do CSR, and how to let it be known that they are doing it. The big auditing and
general-practice consulting firms offer clients CSR advice (while conspicuously striving to be exemplary
corporate citizens themselves). Most multinationals now have a senior executive, often with a staff at
his disposal, explicitly charged with developing and co-coordinating the CSR function. In some cases,
these executives have been recruited from NGOs. There are executive-education programmes in CSR,
business-school chairs in CSR, CSR professional organisations, CSR websites, CSR newsletters and much,
much more. But what does it all amounts to, really? The winners, oddly enough, are disappointed.
They are starting to suspect that they have been conned. Civil-society advocates of CSR increasingly
accuse firms of merely paying lip-service to the idea of good corporate citizenship. Firms are still
mainly interested in making money, they note disapprovingly, whatever the CEO may say in the annual
report. When commercial interests and broader social welfare collide, profit comes first. Judge firms and
their CSR efforts by what the companies do, charities such as Christian Aid (a CSR pioneer) now insist,
not by what they say—and prepare to be unimpressed. By all means, judge companies by their actions.
And, applying that sound measure, CSR enthusiasts are bound to be disappointed. The 2004 Giving List,
published by Britain's Guardian newspaper, showed that the charitable contributions of FTSE 100
companies (including gifts in kind, staff time devoted to charitable causes and related management
costs) averaged just 0.97% of pre-tax profits. A few give more; many give almost nothing (though every
one of them records some sort of charitable contribution). The total is not exactly startling. The figures
for American corporate philanthropy are bigger, but the numbers are unlikely to impress many CSR
advocates.
Cap Good – War
Capitalism prevents war and has historically caused the largest reductions in poverty
and inequality – any other argument ignores empirics and robust economic models
Weede 08 [Erich, professor at the Institute for Political Science and Sociology, “Globalization and
Inequality” Comparative Sociology 7, p. 415-433]
Globalization refers to an increasing international division of labor and more trade between economies, to cross-border investment and rapid
transfers of technology between nations, to global capital flows and, to a lesser degree, to increasing labor mobility. Th ere is as yet no global
labor market. Globalization also implies better opportunities to learn from foreigners or strangers. Th e more similar you are to others, the less
likely it is that you can learn from them.1 Unfortunately, many people prefer to rely on established routines and resent the challenge of having to
learn from others. Globalization
is another word for a worldwide expansion of capitalism. It results in
international tax competition (Edwards and de Rugy 2002; Mitchell 2005). Globalization is based on some technological and
political prerequisites. These include ever cheaper and faster means of communication and transportation as well as an adequate political
environment. The
global expansion of capitalism requires political fragmentation: markets should be
larger than political units.2 This provides an exit option from oppressive government for capital and,
to a lesser degree, for qualified labor. Such an exit option protects economic freedom from ever-increasing state interference and tax burdens. If
one state should be much more powerful than all others, as the US currently is, then globalization requires a deeper commitment to capitalism and
Globalization
maximizes the size of the market. Since Adam Smith (1776/1976) we know that the size of the market determines
the degree of division of labor which promotes productivity. Thus, globalization is beneficial because it increases productivity. This is
not only a theoretical claim, but also an empirical statement. For instance, based on data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics,
yearly economic gains from globalization have been estimated to be somewhere between $1,650 and $3,300
per capita for Americans (Scheve and Slaughter 2007:36–37). Real compensation per hour (including benefits and wages) has
also gone up in the past decade, by 22 percent (Griswold 2007:1).3 Since Deng Xiaoping opened China in the late 1970s by
introducing reforms which imply creeping capitalism, Chinese agricultural production grew rapidly. Later,
China attracted a lot of foreign direct investment. Today China is a major base for manufacturing. By 2005 it was already
economic freedom by the hegemon than by other states. Th ese political requirements of globalization are fulfilled.
the third largest exporter, still behind Germany and the US but already ahead of Japan (Th e Economist 2005). By 2008 China is likely to become
the biggest exporter in the world. In the early 1980s (but no longer thereafter) even the
disparity between urban and rural
incomes in China decreased (Lin, Cai, and Li 2003:145). Hundreds of millions of Chinese were taken out of
abject poverty. In the first two decades of reform, per capita incomes grew fourfold (Bhalla 2002:218). Later, less radical reforms in India
led to nearly doubling per capita incomes in a similar period of time and pulled about two hundred million Indians out of abject poverty (Das
2002:360). Since China and India together account for nearly forty percent of mankind and about half of the population living in less developed
countries, economic
growth in China and India and other Asian countries contributes to the
equalization of the global distributions of income between individuals and households. If we are interested in individuals
rather than states, then the empirical indicators are clear. Globalization or the global expansion of capitalism
has contributed to, or at least been compatible with, an equalization of the size distribution of income between
human beings. Since cross-national differences between average incomes are still a more important component of inequality between
human beings than intra-national differences in income, it is possible – and currently true – to have the following two trajectories at the same
time: growing inequality within many or even most countries amidst some movement towards equality among individuals worldwide (Bhalla
2002; Firebaugh 1999; Goesling 2001; Sala-i-Martin 2007; World Bank 2005). Admittedly, many economies, including the US and China,
suffered some deterioration in their domestic income distributions. This is why the legitimacy of capitalism and globalization comes under attack,
even in the American citadel of capitalism. This is also why calls for protectionism become louder and louder (Scheve and Slaughter 2007). But
critics of globalization tend to forget a basic truth about free trade (Griswold 2007:3): “If workers, capital, and
resources can shift within the domestic economy, jobs eliminated by import competition will
quickly be replaced by jobs created elsewhere.”4 One should not blame the consequences of institutional sclerosis, or of an
unwillingness to adjust, on globalization. Globalization has led to a significant reduction in mass poverty. Although
the Chinese distribution of income has become much less equal since the reform process began in the late 1970s, the strong growth performance
of China has pulled hundreds of millions out of abject poverty. In
India growth has been less spectacular than in China such that the
of millions have been pulled out of abject poverty.
distribution of income has changed less, and yet again hundreds
Although Latin
America and Africa have benefitted much less from globalization than Asia has, these continents also cannot match
the demographic weight of Asia. Therefore, their comparative
lack of success cannot neutralize Asian progress in
global perspective. Moreover, one has to keep in mind that winning in the process of globalization
presupposes participating in it, not abstaining from it. One may illustrate global change with data provided by Indian
economist Surjit Bhalla (2002:187). He defines people with a daily income between $10–$40 USD as members of the global middle class. In
1960 this class consisted largely of whites; only six percent were Asians. By 2000, however, 52 percent was Asian. Th e era of globalization is
one in which Asia is now recovering, after falling for about two centuries further behind the West. Except
for Africa abject
poverty worldwide is likely to become significantly reduced within one or two decades. Th e African share
of abject poverty in the world is expected to rise until 2015 from 36 percent to about 90 percent (Bhalla 2002:S. 172).5 Why did so many people
in Asia benefit from globalization, whereas Africans did not? A plausible explanation has been offered by Collier (2007:79).6 He points out that
quarters of the bottom billion7 live in countries which have suffered from civil war or
long periods of bad governance and poor economic policies. According to Collier (2007:27), “civil war is
development in reverse. It damages both the country itself and its neighbors.” Bad governance and
poor economic policies distort incentives and misallocate the meager resources of poor countries.
Africa has suffered from these development traps to a greater degree than other continents. Moreover, one may argue that
about three
a focus on income and income distributions is biased towards understating the benefits of globalization. As Goklany (2007:chaps. 2–3) has
pointed out, the
same income per capita today (in terms of purchasing power) implies higher life expectancies,
lower infant mortalities, less malnutrition, healthier lives, and less child labor than it did decades or
centuries earlier. Less developed, still poor countries do benefit from the technological progress achieved by
developed and rich countries. Thus, even if one disputes the widely held and well-supported view regarding some equalization of
individual or house-hold incomes worldwide in recent decades, one should still accept Goklany’s contention (2007:72): “In the aspects of human
well-being that are truly critical – life expectancy, infant mortality, hunger, literacy, and child labor – the
world is far more equal
today than it was a century ago, in large part because of globalization.”8 Another advantage of
globalization is that it contributes to preventing war (Russett and Oneal 2001; Weede 2005). Quantitative research
demonstrates that the risk of war between nations is reduced if they trade a lot with each other. There is
something like a commercial peace or peace by trade. Moreover, economic freedom reduces involvement in military
conflict and financial market openness also reduces the risk of war (Gartzke 2005, 2007). In particular, I want to
underline that economic cooperation pacifies the geopolitical relationship between rising China and the West.9 Moreover, there is also
something like a democratic peace. The
risk of war between democracies is extremely small. In my view, one
should conceptualize this as a component of a capitalist peace because democracies prosper best in
wealthy countries10 and because capitalism or economic freedom and thereby globalization contribute to prosperity (Weede 2005, 2006).
Since rising powers tend to challenge the political status quo, it is fortunate that the two demographic giants of this world seem to prosper under
global capitalism.
Capitalism Solves war and Creates Peace
Bandow ‘5 (Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, November 10th, 2005, Spreading
Capitalism Is Good for Peace, http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/spreading-capitalism-isgood-peace)
In a world that seems constantly aflame, one naturally asks: What causes peace? Many people,
including U.S. President George W. Bush, hope that spreading democracy will discourage war. But new
research suggests that expanding free markets is a far more important factor, leading to what
Columbia University's Erik Gartzke calls a "capitalist peace." It's a reason for even the left to support
free markets.¶ The capitalist peace theory isn't new: Montesquieu and Adam Smith believed in it. Many
of Britain's classical liberals, such as Richard Cobden, pushed free markets while opposing imperialism.¶
But World War I demonstrated that increased trade was not enough. The prospect of economic ruin did
not prevent rampant nationalism, ethnic hatred, and security fears from trumping the power of
markets.¶ An even greater conflict followed a generation later. Thankfully, World War II left war
essentially unthinkable among leading industrialized - and democratic - states. Support grew for the
argument, going back to Immanual Kant, that republics are less warlike than other systems.¶ Today's
corollary is that creating democracies out of dictatorships will reduce conflict. This contention
animated some support outside as well as inside the United States for the invasion of Iraq.¶ But
Gartzke argues that "the 'democratic peace' is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and
political freedom." That is, democracies typically have freer economies than do authoritarian states.¶
Thus, while "democracy is desirable for many reasons," he notes in a chapter in the latest volume of
Economic Freedom in the World, created by the Fraser Institute, "representative governments are
unlikely to contribute directly to international peace." Capitalism is by far the more important factor.¶
The shift from statist mercantilism to high-tech capitalism has transformed the economics behind war.
Markets generate economic opportunities that make war less desirable. Territorial aggrandizement no
longer provides the best path to riches.¶ Free-flowing capital markets and other aspects of globalization
simultaneously draw nations together and raise the economic price of military conflict. Moreover,
sanctions, which interfere with economic prosperity, provides a coercive step short of war to achieve
foreign policy ends.¶ Gartzke considers other variables, including alliance memberships, nuclear
deterrence, and regional differences.¶ Although the causes of conflict vary, the relationship between
economic liberty and peace remains.¶ His conclusion hasn't gone unchallenged. Author R.J. Rummel, an
avid proponent of the democratic peace theory, challenges Gartzke's methodology and worries that it
"may well lead intelligent and policy-wise analysts and commentators to draw the wrong conclusions
about the importance of democratization."¶ Gartzke responds in detail, noting that he relied on the
same data as most democratic peace theorists. If it is true that democratic states don't go to war, then
it also is true that "states with advanced free market economies never go to war with each other,
either."¶ The point is not that democracy is valueless. Free political systems naturally entail free
elections and are more likely to protect other forms of liberty - civil and economic, for instance.¶
However, democracy alone doesn't yield peace. To believe is does is dangerous: There's no panacea for
creating a conflict-free world.¶ That doesn't mean that nothing can be done. But promoting open
international markets - that is, spreading capitalism - is the best means to encourage peace as well as
prosperity.¶ Notes Gartzke: "Warfare among developing nations will remain unaffected by the
capitalist peace as long as the economies of many developing countries remain fettered by
governmental control." Freeing those economies is critical.¶ It's a particularly important lesson for the
anti-capitalist left. For the most part, the enemies of economic liberty also most stridently denounce
war, often in near-pacifist terms. Yet they oppose the very economic policies most likely to encourage
peacIf market critics don't realize the obvious economic and philosophical value of markets - prosperity
and freedom - they should appreciate the unintended peace dividend. Trade encourages prosperity and
stability; technological innovation reduces the financial value of conquest; globalization creates
economic interdependence, increasing the cost of war.¶ Nothing is certain in life, and people are
motivated by far more than economics. But it turns out that peace is good business. And capitalism is
good for peace.
Capitalism Decreases the Amount of War, the Past 60 Years Proves
Gartzke ‘5 (Erik Gartzke, Researcher at the Cato Institute, October 1st, 2005,
Future Depends on Capitalizing on Capitalist Peace,
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/future-depends-capitalizing-capitalist-peace)
With terrorism achieving "global reach" and conflict raging in Africa and the Middle East, you may have
missed a startling fact - we are living in remarkably peaceable times.¶ For six decades, developed
nations have not fought each other. France and the United States may chafe, but the resulting conflict
pitted french fries against "freedom fries," rather than French soldiers against U.S. "freedom fighters."
Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac had a nasty spat over the EU, but the English aren't going to storm Calais
any time soon.¶ The present peace is unusual. Historically, powerful nations are the most war prone.
The conventional wisdom is that democracy fosters peace but this claim fails scrutiny. It is based on
statistical studies that show democracies typically don't fight other democracies.¶ Yet, the same studies
show that democratic nations go to war about as much as other nations overall. And more recent
research makes clear that only the affluent democracies are less likely to fight each other. Poor
democracies behave much like non-democracies when it comes to war and lesser forms of conflict.¶ A
more powerful explanation is emerging from newer, and older, empirical research - the "capitalist
peace." As predicted by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Norman Angell and others, nations with high levels
of economic freedom not only fight each other less, they go to war less often, period. Economic
freedom is a measure of the depth of free market institutions or, put another way, of capitalism.¶ The
"democratic peace" is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom.
Democracy and economic freedom typically co-exist. Thus, if economic freedom causes peace, then
statistically democracy will also appear to cause peace.¶ When democracy and economic freedom are
both included in a statistical model, the results reveal that economic freedom is considerably more
potent in encouraging peace than democracy, 50 times more potent, in fact, according to my own
research. Economic freedom is highly statistically significant (at the one-per-cent level). Democracy does
not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels of economic freedom are 14 times
more prone to conflict than those with very high levels.¶ But, why would free markets cause peace?
Capitalism is not only an immense generator of prosperity; it is also a revolutionary source of
economic, social and political change. Wealth no longer arises primarily through land or control of
natural resources.¶ New Kind of Wealth¶ Prosperity in modern societies is created by market competition
and the efficient production that arises from it. This new kind of wealth is hard for nations to "steal"
through conquest.¶ In days of old, when the English did occasionally storm Calais, nobles dreamed of
wealth and power in conquered lands, while visions of booty danced in the heads of peasant soldiers.
Victory in war meant new property. In a free market economy, war destroys immense wealth for victor
and loser alike. Even if capital stock is restored, efficient production requires property rights and free
decisions by market participants that are difficult or impossible to co-ordinate to the victor's advantage.
The Iraqi war, despite Iraq's immense oil wealth, will not be a money-maker for the United States.¶
Economic freedom is not a guarantee of peace. Other factors, like ideology or the perceived need for
self-defence, can still result in violence. But, where economic freedom has taken hold, it has made war
less likely.¶ Research on the capitalist peace has profound implications in today's world. Emerging
democracies, which have not stabilized the institutions of economic freedom, appear to be at least as
warlike - perhaps more so - than emerging dictatorships.¶ Yet, the United States and other western
nations are putting immense resources into democratization even in nations that lack functioning free
markets. This is in part based on the faulty premise of a "democratic peace." It may also in part be due
to public perception.¶ Everyone approves of democracy, but "capitalism" is often a dirty word.
However, in recent decades, an increasing number of people have rediscovered the economic virtues
of the "invisible hand" of free markets. We now have an additional benefit of economic freedom international peace.¶ The actual presence of peace in much of the world sets this era apart from others.
The empirical basis for optimistic claims - about either democracy or capitalism - can be tested and
refined.¶ The way forward is to capitalize on the capitalist peace, to deepen its roots and extend it to
more countries through expanding markets, development, and a common sense of international
purpose. The risk today is that faulty analysis and anti-market activists may distract the developed
nations from this historic opportunity.
Cap Inevitable
Capitalism is inevitable. Even the groups that resist it are part and parcel of the
system.
Wilson 2000, coordinator of the Independent Press Association’s Campus Journalism Project, 2000
(John K., coordinator of the Independent Press Association’s Campus Journalism Project, How the Left
can Win Arguments and Influence People, pg 12- 14)
Progressive capitalism is not a contradiction in terms, for progressives support capitalism in
many ways. Even nonprofit organizations and cooperatives are not antithetical to capitalism and
the market; these groups simply use capitalism for aims different from the single-minded
pursuit of profits. But the rules of supply and demand, the expenses and revenues, the idea of entrepreneurship and innovation, and
the need to adapt to the market are essential. Any progressive magazine or institution that tries to defy the rules of capitalism won't be around
for very long and certainly won’t have the resources to mount a serious advocacy of progressive ideas. One
of the most effective
tactics of the environmental movement was encouraging consumers to consider environmental
values when making capitalist choices about what products to buy. Today, a manufacturer who
ignores environmental issues puts its profits at risk because so many people are looking for environmentally friendly
products and packaging. Crusades against Coca-Cola for its massive output of non-recycled plastic bottles in America or against companies
supporting foreign dictatorships are part of the continuing battle to force companies to pay attention to consumer demands. Of course,
consumer protests and boycotts are only one part of making "capitalism for everyone." Many progressive groups are now buying stock in
companies precisely to raise these issues at stockholder meetings and pressure the companies to adopt environmentally and socially
responsible policies. Unfortunately, the legal system is structured against progressive ideas. In 2000, Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream was forced to
sell out to a big corporation that might ignore its commitment to many progressive causes. The company didn't want to sell, but the law
demanded that the company's duty to stockholders was to consider only the money involved. Imagine
what would happen if
our capitalist laws were designed to promote progressive ideas instead of impeding them.
Instead of allowing a shareholder lawsuit against any company acting in a morally, socially, and
environmentally conscious way, American laws should encourage these goals. The claim by some
leftists that capitalism is inherently irresponsible or evil doesn't make sense. Capitalism is simply
a system of markets. What makes capitalism so destructive isn't the basic foundation but the
institutions that have been created in the worship of the "free market." Unfortunately,
progressives spend most of their time attacking capitalism rather than taking credit for all the
reforms that led to America's economic growth.
Capitalism inevitable, despite crises and riots
World Socialist Movement 09
(World Socialist Movement, socialist organization, 09, http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pdf/wcwnc.pdf)
The depression shows itself, every few years, in the accumulation of stocks of goods in the hands of retail stores,
wholesalers and manufacturers, farmers and others. While trade is relatively good each concern tries to produce as much as possible in
order to make a large profit. It is nobody's business under Capitalism to find out how much of each article is required, so that
industries quickly expand to the point at which their total output is far larger than can be
sold at a profit. Quite young industries like artificial silk, soon reach the degree of over-development shown by the older
industries. Goods such as farm crops, that are ordinarily not produced to order, but with the expectation of finding a buyer eventually,
As traders find it
more difficult to sell, they reduce their orders to the wholesalers, who in turn stop buying
from the manufacturers. Plans for extending production by constructing new buildings,
plant, ships, etc., are cancelled and the workers are laid off. The reduced income of the workers and of the
naturally tend to accumulate to a greater extent than those produced only to order—such as railway engines.
unemployed reduces still further the demand for goods. In desperate need of ready money to pay their bills, retailers, wholesalers and
manufacturers are driven to sell their stocks at lower and lower prices—often at a price less than the original cost price. Workers, for the
same reason, are forced to offer to work for lower wages. It is not that there is any lack of money, but that the rich who have it can find
no profitable field for investment. The economies that are made in a time of depression—whether voluntary ones, or economies enforced
on the workers by wage reductions, actually aggravate the crisis instead of relieving it. Yet “economise” is the advice given by public
men now, as it was by Mr. Bourne in 1876, referred to earlier in this pamphlet. Here is a situation that always causes grave discontent. It
is from this discontent that the believers in the theory of the collapse of Capitalism think that they can draw the force which will
overthrow the capitalist system. But it does not work out like that. In
spite of riots and agitations, Capitalism still
continues. The actual events show us why this is and why it must be so.
Cap Sustainable
Capitalism is self-correcting
National Post 8 ("Don't Panic," National Edition, April 26, 2008 Saturday, Lexis)
But history
shows that human adaptation invariably intervenes --especially in parts of the world that
have the benefit of a market economy. Scarcity drives innovations that pull the world back from
the brink. Consumers take high prices as their cue to consume less; producers take the same cue
to produce more. A new equilibrium is reached, just as college microeconomics textbooks would predict. That's
why we aren't losing any sleep over the latest predictions from Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce chief economist Jeffrey
Rubin, which were fronted prominently on Friday's National Post. New inventions, new oil discoveries and improvements in
existing technologies will conspire to spare us Mr. Rubin's parade of horribles, which include $2.25-a-litre gasoline and tens of
thousands of job losses in the auto-making sector. In a report entitled The Age of Scarcity, released on Thursday, Mr. Rubin
predicts that by 2012, demand for oil, gas and diesel in the rest of the world will exceed that in OECD countries. As developing
nations get richer, they will begin competing with the current industrialized world for diminishing resources. This will drive up
the cost of everything from energy to food to computer components. Mr. Rubin predicts this will lead to the biggest economic
disruption in North America since the 1973 oil crisis. But that same historical comparison suggests a reason Canadians should be
suspicious of this ominous forecast: While the oil shortages of the 1970s displaced millions of assembly-
line workers and led to a temporary slowdown of the North American economy, the adaptations
they spurred ultimately made industry more efficient and ordinary people more prosperous.
North American manufacturing is far more productive and energy-efficient now than it was 30
years ago, as well as producing far less pollution. (Many Canadians under 30, who have been reared on a
constant diet of dire environmental claims, may have trouble believing this, but despite the rapid growth of our economy in the
last three decades, smog is actually less toxic and our waters less polluted than in 1970.) In an interview with the National Post,
Mr. Rubin fell into a common trap: He
assumed growth is a zero-sum game, whereby someone must lose
ground every time someone else gains it. "I think there will be fewer people on the road in North America in five
years than there is right now," Mr. Rubin said on Thursday. "For everybody who's about to get on the road by buying a new Tata
or a Chery car in the developing world, someone's going to have to get off the road in this part of the world. There's just not
enough gasoline to go around." Anyone tempted to buy into this line of thinking would do well to remember the famous bet
between Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the apocalyptic 1968 book The Population Bomb, and economist Julian Simon. Mr. Erlich
predicted that by the late 1970s, the world would begin to run out of oil and metals, and that "wide-scale famine caused by
declining food production" would cause hundreds of millions of deaths annually. Mr. Simon, on the other hand contended, that
"natural
resources are not finite in any serious way; they are created by the intellect of man, an
always renewable resource." In 1980, he bet Mr. Ehrlich $1,000 that by 1990 a basket of any five commodities of his
choosing would cost less than it had 10 years earlier. By the end-is-nigh thinking embraced by Mr. Ehrlich (and, to a lesser
extent, Mr. Rubin), he should have won easily. Instead, Mr. Simon won. The five commodities chosen were, after inflation, 40%
cheaper in 1990 than they had been a decade before. The same pattern is beginning to unfold in 2008. In just a few short
months, rising
prices for fuel have prompted the sort of market-driven energy efficiencies and
environmental solutions that the green movement has failed to achieve through years of
hectoring, regulating and legislating. Full-sized SUV sales have plummeted, home builders are
designing smaller, low-consumption houses, airlines and railways are switching to more efficient
planes and engines and car makers are scrambling to lighten their models. Thanks to just a 30%
increase in pump prices, the automobile sector is likely to raise fleet fuel efficiency more than all
the laws demanding higher standards passed in the past 35 years combined. There is no doubt that our
society is changing because of the scarcity in food and fuel that Mr. Rubin highlights. But it defies the principles of economics to
imagine that such scarcity will persist indefinitely. If
there is one trend we can depend on, it is that the law of
supply and demand will intervene to blunt the economic shocks that even the most prosperous
nations must inevitably face.
Companies that practice sustainable capitalism have increased profit
Gore and Blood 11. (December 14, 2011.
Al Gore: former vice president, Nobel Peace Prize recipient for climate activism. David Blood:
Former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, co-founder of Generation Investment Management. The Wall Street Journal. “A Manifesto
for Sustainable Capitalism: How businesses can embrace environmental, social and governance metrics.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203430404577092682864215896.html)\
We are once again facing one of those rare turning points in history when dangerous challenges and limitless opportunities cry out for clear,
long-term thinking. The disruptive threats now facing the planet are extraordinary: climate change, water scarcity, poverty, disease, growing
income inequality, urbanization, massive economic volatility and more. Businesses
cannot be asked to do the job of
governments, but companies and investors will ultimately mobilize most of the capital needed to
overcome the unprecedented challenges we now face. Before the crisis and since, we and others have
called for a more responsible form of capitalism, what we call sustainable capitalism: a framework
that seeks to maximize long-term economic value by reforming markets to address real needs while
integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics throughout the decision-making
process. Such sustainable capitalism applies to the entire investment value chain—from entrepreneurial ventures to large public companies,
seed-capital providers to institutional investors, employees to CEOs, activists to policy makers. It transcends borders, industries, asset classes
and stakeholders. Those
who advocate sustainable capitalism are often challenged to spell out why
sustainability adds value. Yet the question that should be asked instead is: "Why does an absence of
sustainability not damage companies, investors and society at large?" From BP to Lehman Brothers,
there is a long list of examples proving that it does. Moreover, companies and investors that integrate
sustainability into their business practices are finding that it enhances profitability over the longer
term. Experience and research show that embracing sustainable capitalism yields four kinds of important benefits
for companies: Developing sustainable products and services can increase a company's profits, enhance its brand, and
improve its competitive positioning, as the market increasingly rewards this behavior. Sustainable capitalism can
also help companies save money by reducing waste and increasing energy efficiency in the supply
chain, and by improving human-capital practices so that retention rates rise and the costs of training
new employees decline. Third, focusing on ESG metrics allows companies to achieve higher compliance
standards and better manage risk since they have a more holistic understanding of the material issues
affecting their business. Researchers (including Rob Bauer and Daniel Hann of Maastricht University, and Beiting Cheng, Ioannis
Ioannou and George Serafeim of Harvard) have found that sustainable businesses realize financial benefits such as lower cost of debt and lower
capital constraints. Sustainable capitalism is also important for investors. Mr. Serafeim and his colleague Robert G. Eccles have shown that
sustainable companies outperform their unsustainable peers in the long term. Therefore, investors who identify companies that embed
sustainability into their strategies can earn substantial returns, while experiencing low volatility.
Capitalism is self-correcting and solves sustainability issues
Watts 09 (December 4, 2009.
Tyler Watts: assistant professor of economics at Ball State University, PhD in economics at George Mason
University. Ludwig von Mises Institute. “Sustainability: An Assault on Economics.” http://mises.org/daily/3886)
But deep down, there's something unsettling about the basic premise of sustainability. Sustainability
advocates — let's call them "sustainists" — are damning in their fervor, poise, and rhetoric. Their
ideology is pregnant with an accusation that the way things currently are is somehow unsustainable.
There's an alarmism here which essentially claims, "there's a crisis, it's your fault for being ignorant,
irrational, and greedy. You must do as we say to fix it, or we'll all die." This alarmist crusade, which
underlies the sustainability movement, should rankle people with an economic understanding of the
world. A basic tenet of economics is that markets are self-correcting and orderly; prices indicate
resource constraints and guide people in economizing on their use. Prices change as underlying supply
and demand conditions change, inducing appropriate adjustments in consumption and production
patterns. Prices channel the profit motive — a natural aspect of the human condition — into
productive and innovative activities. In short, prices work.
Capitalism’s internal workings solve resource shortages
Watts 09 (December 4, 2009.
Tyler Watts: assistant professor of economics at Ball State University, PhD in economics at George Mason
University. Ludwig von Mises Institute. “Sustainability: An Assault on Economics.” http://mises.org/daily/3886)
The sustainability movement is an assault on economics. It claims at its core that prices don't operate through
time to direct consumption and production decisions in a sustainable way. A lesson in basic economics should
suffice to defend against the sustainists' attack. Prices arise in the market economy as a concomitant of mutually beneficial exchange. People
want things that improve their lives — we call this value. Some valuable things are more scarce than others; take the classic case of water and
diamonds. In absolute terms, water is more valuable than diamonds: you don't need diamonds to live. Yet water is, pound for pound, far
cheaper. Why? Although it's valuable, it is also relatively abundant; in many parts of the world, it literally does fall from the sky. The price of any
good reflects this combination of value and scarcity. We're willing to pay more for valuable things as they become relatively scarce (e.g., oil);
and we needn't pay as much for valuable things as they become more abundant (e.g., grain). Likewise, as
scarce things lose their
value, people are no longer willing to pay for them (e.g., typewriters), and people must pay more for
scarce things that suddenly become sought after (e.g., vintage Michael Jackson records). The
awesome thing about prices is that they seamlessly convey this combination of facts about an item's
value (demand) and it's scarcity (supply). Prices, of course, are subject to change — prices of certain
goods fluctuate every day. But this is a good thing; discernable trends in prices over time indicate
relative changes in the "market fundamentals" of supply and demand. In this sense, prices reliably
guide individuals, both consumers and producers, toward a rational use of resources. Savvy
consumers listen to the prices; a rising price trend tells them to cut back on that particular item, and a
falling price tells them to go ahead and use a little more of it. The same basic logic applies on the
production side. Entrepreneurs, driven by the profit motive, are like bloodhounds sniffing out these price trends in search of profit
opportunities — chances to create value through exchange. If the price of a good trends strongly upwards over time (indicating it has become
scarcer and/or more valuable), they rush to find cheaper substitutes. The cheaper the substitutes, the higher the profits to be had, especially if
you're the first to market. If prices trend downwards over time (indicating that the resource is becoming more abundant relative to its
usefulness), entrepreneurs devote their efforts elsewhere. The general outcome of these economic processes is captured by the statement
"prices coordinate." In other words, the price system acts as an "invisible hand," guiding people — both consumers and producers — in their
economic actions. The real beauty of this free-market price system is that it brings about its own kind of sustainability. This is not so much
sustainability in the use of particular resources — for particular goods fall in and out of favor according to supply and demand factors — but
sustainability of high economic growth and high standards of living in the economically developed, capitalist economies. Take,
as an
example, the transition in the market for interior illumination: tallow candles were replaced by whaleoil lamps, which were replaced by kerosene lamps, which were replaced by incandescent bulbs
powered by electricity. There was no social or political pressure needed to accomplish this evolution;
there was no "peak whale oil" movement, no kerosene conservationists, no sustainability crusade of
yore. All it took was a functional price system, combined with the ever-present entrepreneurial drive for profits under a competitive, freemarket order. Likewise, in our time as sustainists and other worrywarts fret about resource depletion, the
price system remains functional, quietly yet assuredly guiding individuals to economize on resources,
search out profitable substitutes, and anticipate future trends. All this happens without preaching,
without crusades, and without activism.
Gibson-Graham
The negatives representation of capitalism as an entity so gigantic that we can’t help
but feel overwhelmed in the face of it, destroys concrete political action and feeds
capitals strength
J.K. Gibson-Graham, the pen name of Katherine Gibson, Senior Fellow of Human Geography at Australian National University,
and Julie Graham, professor of Geography at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1996, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It),
p. viii-x
In a very different discursive setting, I had recently encountered Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s description of what she calls the “Christmas effect.”
To Sedgwick’s mind what is so depressing about Christmas is the way all the institutions of society come together and speak “with one voice
(1993: 5): the Christian churches, of course, but also the
state (which establishes school and national holidays),
commerce, advertising, the media (revving up the Christmas frenzy and barking out the Christmas
countdown), social events and domestic activities, “they all . . . line up with each other so neatly once
a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes” (p. 6). Sedgwick
points to a similar monolithic formation in the realm of expectations about sexuality, where gender, object choice, sexual practices (including
the privileging of certain organs and orifices), and “lifestyles” or life choices are expected to come together in predictable associations. This set
of expectations, which counters and yet constrains the sexual experience of so many, is not just the occasion of seasonal distress. It is a source
of lifelong oppression, a matter of survival, and a painful constrictor of sexual possibility, if not desire. In my comments as a discussant I
seemed to be chafing against a similarly constraining “Christmas effect” in the realm of social theory .
The researchers had set out to produce a rich and differentiated set of stories about industrial and community change, but they ended up
showing how households and communities accommodated to changes in the industrial sector. In their papers things not only lined up with but
revolved around industry, producing a unified social representation centered on a capitalist economy (the sort of thing that’s called a “capitalist
society” in both everyday and academic discussion). But Sedgwick’s questions about Christmas, the family, and sexuality suggested the
possibility of other kinds of social representations: “What if. . . there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can
be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing?” (1993: 6). For this
research project following Sedgwick’s suggestions might mean that unstable gender identities, inabilities to adapt to the new shiftwork
schedule, and noncapitalist economic activities should be emphasized rather than swept under the rug. The vision of households, subjects, and
capitalist industry operating in harmony (and in fact coming together in a new phase of capitalist hegemony) might be replaced by alternative
social representations in which noncapitalist economic practices proliferated, gender identities were renegotiated, and political subjects
Sedgwick’s vision suggests the
possibility of representing societies and economies as non-hegemonic formations. What if we were to
depict social existence at loose ends with itself, in Sedgwick’s terms, rather than producing social
representations in which everything is part of the same complex and therefore ultimately “means the
same thing” (e.g., capitalist hegemony)? What might be the advantages of representing a rich and
prolific disarray? I was particularly attuned to these problems and possibilities because I had myself been a producer, in my
earlier work as a political economist, of representations of capitalist hegemony. As a member of a large and loosely connected
actively resisted industrial restructuring, thereby influencing its course. More generally,
group of political economic theorists who were interested in what had happened to capitalist economies following on the economic crisis of the
1970s, I had engaged in theorizing the ways in which industrial production, enterprises, forms of consumption, state regulation, business
culture, and the realm of ideas and politics all seemed to undergo a change in the 1970s and 80s from one hegemonic configuration to another.
It didn’t matter that I was very interested in the differences between industries or that I did not see
industrial change —even widespread change — as emanating from or reflecting a macrologic of “the economy.” I
was still representing a world in which economy, polity, culture, and subjectivity reinforced each
other and wore a capitalist face. Chasing the illusion that I was understanding the world in order to change it, I was running
in a well-worn track, and had only to cast a glance over my shoulder to see, as the product of my
analysis, “capitalist society” even more substantial and definitive than when I began. In those exciting
early days I had yet to take seriously the “performativity” of social representations — in other words, the
ways in which they are implicated in the worlds they ostensibly represent. I was still trying to capture “what was happening out there,” like the
researchers on the panel. I wasn’t thinking about the social representation I was creating as constitutive of the world in which I would have to
the image of global capitalism that I was producing was actively participating in consolidating a
new phase of capitalist hegemony.1 Over a period of years this became increasingly clear to me and increasingly distressing. My
situation resembled that of the many other social theorists for whom the “object of critique” has become a perennial and
live. Yet
consequential theoretical issue. When theorists depict patriarchy, or racism, or compulsory
heterosexuality, or capitalist hegemony they are not only delineating a formation they hope to see
destabilized or replaced. They are also generating a representation of the social world and endowing
it with performative force. To the extent that this representation becomes influential it may
contribute to the hegemony of a “hegemonic formation”; and it will undoubtedly influence people’s
ideas about the possibilities of difference and change, including the potential for successful political
interventions.
Transition Wars
Collapse of capitalism leads to transition wars
Kathari 82
(Kathari, Professor of political science, University Delhi, 1982, Towards a Just Social Order, p. 571)
Attempts at global economic reform could also lead to a world racked by increasing turbulence, a greater
sense of insecurity among the major centres of power – and hence to a further tightening of the structures of
domination and domestic repression – producing in their wake an intensification of the old arms race and
militarization of regimes, encouraging regional conflagrations and setting the stage for
eventual global holocaust.
Collapse of capitalism will only lead to transition wars that restore capitalism
SouthernBanking 95
(SouthernBanking, human rights organization, 11/28/95,
http://www.southerndomains.com/SouthernBanks/trans.html)
Where Marxist theory breaks down is in terms of predicting how the two general classes would
react and how the politics would work. In fact, during the 1930s, the capitalist class around the
world made deals with anti-communists, from the Fascists of Italy and later in Spain to the Nazi Party in Germany. Both
America as well as Great Britain had fascist parties. Our own Charles 'Lucky Lindy' Lindberg was an ardent admirer of the German
Luftwaffe. The royal family of Britain played footsy with local fascists, as well as with their German associates across the Channel. And the
working class rallied around its own representatives, usually labor union- based political groupings. Again, how this would have finished
playing out in America and Britain without the intervention of World War ll, is so much speculation. I have seen no realistic economic
analysis which indicates a way out of the depression, apart from what actually occurred. True, some monetarists continue to claim that only a
bad monetary policy by the Federal Reserve caused the market crash of 1929 to deteriorate into the Great Depression. Still, I have not seen
did
occur and the capitalist system returned to vibrant levels of production with the war and once
war ceased, the world economy coughed for a couple of years, but production soon returned to
pre-depression levels of growth and stayed that high for almost two decades, more than
sufficient time for conservative economists and political conservatives to distort the actual
history of the 1920s and 1930s. Still, distortions or not, these conservatives could not refute the labor theory of value and as
an analysis of how the Federal Reserve might have righted the economy, once the damage had been done, say by 1931. The war
production escalated beyond all purchasing power of the working and middle classes during the early 1980s, America went on a debt boom.
The extra production was consumed during the 1980s, but at an unprecedented level of debt.